Tuesday May 26, 2020

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

San Juan The

50¢

DAILY

Star

Amy Schumer Misses Stand-Up P20

Three Months and Nothing Alexa’s Murder Overshadowed by Pandemic PR Police Homicide Division Says It Is Doing the Impossible to Solve the Crime It’s Been One Month Since Another Two Trans Women Were Slain

‘We Are Vigilant’: Governor Warns on More Restrictions

P4

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

P3

No Words from Trump on Death Toll; Lots of Golf, Twitter

P7

2

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

GOOD MORNING

3

May 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star, the only paper with News Service in English in Puerto Rico, publishes 7 days a week, with a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday edition, along with a Weekend Edition to cover Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Alexa’s murder, overshadowed by the pandemic, is still a priority according to the Police

Today’s

Weather Day

Night

High

Low

90ºF

77ºF

Precip 20%

Precip 20%

Partly Cloudy

Partly Cloudy

Wind: Humidity: UV Index: Sunrise: Sunset:

Her death, and the murder of two other transgender women in Humacao, underscore the dangers the community faces on the islandcing

By JOSÉ A. SÁNCHEZ FOURNIER @SanchezFournier Special to The Star

A

From ESE 13 mph 78% 10 of 10 5:48 AM Local Time 6:55 PM Local Time

INDEX Local 3 Mainland 7 Business 11 International 13 Viewpoint 17 Noticias en Español 19 Entertainment 20 Pets 22

Health Science Legals Sports Games Horoscope Cartoons

23 24 25 26 29 30 31

lthough her name has receded from the headlines due to the damage that the coronavirus pandemic has caused in Puerto Rico and all over the world, solving the murder of Alexa Negrón Luciano is still a priority for the Puerto Rico Police.

Negrón Luciano, also known as Neulisa Luciano Ruiz, was a 29-year-old transgender woman who was shot to death while walking on the side of a road in Toa Baja, on Feb. 24. The shooting occurred less than 12 hours after she was involved in an incident in a fast food restaurant’s bathroom where police intervened, but no one was arrested.

The murder three months ago horrified the island and was front-page news for a while, especially after an unconfirmed video, in which Negrón Luisiano appeared to be shot at, went viral.

“Since day one we have been focused on solving this crime,” said Puerto Rico Police Capt. Ricardo Haddock, who is overseeing the investigation. “The very day of the murder we created a task force to look into this case, it was and is a priority for us.”

Haddock said the lack of strong forensic and circumstantial evidence has made it difficult for the police to zero in on a suspect.

“We have taken multiple investigative actions but obviously these have not produced the positive result we hoped for,” he said. “But we have interviewed several persons of interest in this case and we are still looking into it.”

At this point, Haddock believes that unless a witness or a person with specific information related to the crime steps forward and talks to the police, the investigation is going to be stuck in limbo.

“The key for the resolution of this case is the public,” Haddock said. “If someone with information contacts us, we will take care of the rest.”

Alexa’s case was neither the first nor the last murder of a trans person on the island.

On April 22, two trans women were found dead

inside a burned out car on a desolate road in Humacao.

The victims were identified as 21-year-old Layla Peláez and 32-year-old Serena Angelique Velázquez.

They were New York residents who were visiting family and friends on the island.

A week after the discovery of the bodies, two men were arrested in relation to the double murder. Juan Carlos Padilla and Sean Díaz were arrested after investigators found images of the suspects and the victims socializing together. The images were published on one of the victims’ social media accounts.

According to the authorities, it seems that their encounter became deadly after the two men found out that Peláez and Velázquez were trans women.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) took the case due to the fact that the evidence points to it being a hate crime. At the time of publication, The San Juan Daily Star was unable to reach an FBI spokesperson for an update on the case.

While Alexa’s case can also be seen as a hate crime due to its particular circumstances, the Police so far have not labeled it as such. Haddock also said that, although Alexa’s murder seems to be an isolated incident and not a link in a chain of similar attacks, they have not closed any doors on that matter.

“We have not discarded any possibilities,” Haddock said. “We are still investigating and looking for any new angles. This murder captured the attention of the people and we will continue to search for those responsible for her murder.”

The area where Alexa Negron Luciano was killed in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico, Feb. 26, 2020. (Erika P. Rodriguez/ The New York Times)

4

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Governor scolds those who packed beaches, rivers, businesses; warns on restrictive measures

By THE STAR STAFF

A

fter a long weekend spent by many island residents hanging out at the beach, Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced sent an ultimatum through her social media platforms. The message was for those who didn’t respect social distancing guidelines and left mountains of trash.

Photos of large groups partying at the beaches, without masks, packed businesses, the use of unauthorized vehicles and lots of trash left behind circulated all over social media and other news outlets.

Vázquez warned on Monday that she will take restrictive measures after the behavior of some citizens during Memorial Day weekend.

“Although a large number of citizens complied

with the guidelines of the executive order, in some images from this weekend [others] showed a lack of awareness, which only causes those who did well to become infected by those who did not,” the governor said in a written statement.

“The conduct and irresponsibility of some citizens shows that they are not clear about the consequences of their behavior on beaches, at rivers, at establishments and even on public roads,” she added.

“We are vigilant, and if this becomes the norm, we will take more restrictive measures,” Vázquez said.

“Each citizen has to be responsible and cannot put everyone’s health at risk.”

The recent executive order made some activities more flexible, among them the use of beaches, but not for an extended period of time.

National Guard to carry out emergency response exercises

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he Puerto Rico National Guard (PRNG) together with various island municipalities will be carrying out an emergency response exercise so that government officials and emergency management personnel (municipal and state) can exercise their response plans in emergencies to identify immediate needs, capacity gaps and operational limitations, and coordinate support requirements.

The emergency response exercise is scheduled to start today and will continue through Aug. 31.

“The quality of the initial response in an emergency will be consistent with the degree of preparedness,” said PRNG Adj. Gen. José J. Reyes. “This is only achieved through a process that shows the strengths and weaknesses in the action plans and that can only be seen in exercises like this one.”

“The purpose of the exercise is not to rewrite the emergency plans, but rather to continue applying the lessons learned in past emergencies,” Reyes added. “This is a process that never ends.”

For operational purposes, the PRNG has divided the island into four areas of operations with their respective command headquarters -- North, South, East and West task forces.

The exercise will consider the natural disaster scenarios to which islanders are exposed, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and pandemics.

Initially, the response exercises will

impact the municipalities of Cataño, Loíza, Canóvanas and San Lorenzo in the North and East areas, respectively, then continuing with all the municipalities.

“We seek to cover three basic objectives with this exercise,” Reyes said. “First: that mayors and first responders can establish an adequate command structure and develop an incident action plan. This will facilitate the initial establishment of the response plan together with the personnel responsible for it.

“Second: identify limitations, capacity gaps and the necessary requirements to improve the response. Not all municipalities have the equipment, material or personnel necessary, or are trained, to respond to emergency situations.

“During the exercise we will identify those points which will be included in the response plan according to the municipality and the cases presented.

“Third, once the limitations and specific requirements have been identified, the interagency coordination process will be established with state and federal representatives, where the immediate support requirements identified during the year will be provided.”

Two scenarios will be evaluated during the exercise: a category 3-4 hurricane and a 7.0 magnitude earthquake generating a tsunami in the north of the island, and the development of a virus with pandemic possibilities.

These scenarios will be worked under the situational process where the response and actions will be evaluated based on a series of guiding questions that will be discussed as the exercise progresses.

Young San Lorenzans take food to neighborhoods in need

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

S

ocial distancing and quarantine necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic emergency has not diminished the sense of solidarity and brotherhood shared by Puerto Rico residents.

Recognizing the challenges faced by different communities in San Lorenzo, a group of friends decided to bring aid to various families in the Quemados and Jagual neighborhoods.

“We have had the opportunity to continue working and generating income, but we recognize that there are other families that have not had the same opportunity,” said Joan Neris, one of the coordinators of the initiative. “For this reason, a group of friends made purchases and cooked meals to take to other families.”

The group made up of 12 young people from different parts of San Lorenzo — taking the necessary protective measures — delivered more than 200 plates of hot food to families in both

neighborhoods.

They delivered clothes, ice cream and coloring books for the little ones, who expressed their thanks with a smile.

“Without a doubt, the best thanks are to see the children’s faces enjoying simple things like an ice cream or a coloring book,” Neris said. “We need more people who want to bring a little hope and joy in these times of great challenges.”

The coordinator of the group said the experience has been very satisfying, so they do not rule out continuing to take aid to other neighborhoods.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

5

Off to the races and looking for an upset Already hurting prior to the COVID-19 curfew, the local horse racing industry appears at odds with the gov’t order for the reopening of Camarero Racetrack

By JOSÉ A. SÁNCHEZ FOURNIER @SanchezFournier Special to The Star

T

he newly enacted government order establishing the guidelines for the reopening of Camarero Racetrack apparently left no one happy in the local horse racing community.

On Monday, Puerto Rico Gaming Commission Executive Director José Maymó Azize signed Administrative Order 202011, which imposes the parameters for the resumption of horse races at Camarero Racetrack (known locally as Hipódromo Camarero) in Canóvanas.

But stable owners and Camarero Racetrack management are at odds with the order, with one side asking for more industry-specific guidelines that permit a safer and more eco-

nomically viable return to the track, and the other alleging that the guidelines are just another delay tactic from the Gaming Commission and Camarero management.

“We prepared a comprehensive proposal with recommendations on how to reopen with as little risk of contagion as possible while looking for solid economic gains,” said Camarero Racetrack CEO Ervin Rodríguez Vélez. “It is a large document, 30 pages. All we want is to have an opportunity to present our proposal to Governor Wanda Vázquez’s Economic Task Force so that we can discuss it and look for the best option for returning to Camarero.”

“He [Maymó Azize] issued an order that allows the return to racing on June 5, but it hurts the reopening in three areas,” Rodríguez Vélez said.

The Camarero CEO said the new order only allows one client at a time in betting agencies, which would make it practically impossible for them to open. Rodríguez Vélez also said the new order does not allow for horse racing on Sundays and disallows the reopening of the video betting and slot machines, one of the main revenue providers for both betting parlor owners and for the Canóvanas horse track.

“Sunday is the strongest day for horse racing, when they run the best races and when there are more bets made,” said the Camarero CEO, who is supposed to meet with the governor’s Economic Task Force today.

“We hope that they listen to our proposal and that we can have an honest discussion of what options would be better for the local horse racing community,” added Rodríguez Vélez.

Meanwhile, the president of the Puerto Rico Thorough-

bred Horse Breeders Association, Eduardo Maldonado Ruiz, said that although the reopening order is a step in the right direction, it still allows Camarero’s management to prolong the reopening date.

“We were calling for the reopening of Camarero as soon as possible, and it seems to me that the governor took the right decision,” said Maldonado Ruiz, who led a protest from Dos Hermanos Bridge in Condado to Old San Juan to bring the Association’s claims to the public arena. “But these people [Camarero’s management] do not want to open without the video betting machines. This is just another delaying tactic from Camarero’s owners and Maymó Azize.”

“If they keep the racetrack closed, they will be hurting the income of around 10,000 families whose livelihood depends directly or indirectly on the local horse racing industry,” Maldonado Ruiz said.

Governor pushes tougher penalties for sexual ‘grooming’

By THE STAR STAFF

G

ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced has submitted to the island Legislature a measure that would amend the Puerto Rico Penal Code to further criminalize socalled “grooming,” or approaching minors with the goal of perpetrating sexual abuse or otherwise harming them.

“We repudiate any type of behavior that may endanger our minors,” the governor said Monday in a written statement. “We will not stop searching for alternatives to protect our children and adolescents from the clutches of sexual predators or ill-intentioned people. With this measure, we take an additional step in the right direction to look out for our future generations and to hold firmly and forcefully responsible those who dare to even attempt to sexually abuse our minors.”

Grooming can be conducted in person or online, for example via interaction through social media, web forums and emails.The offense consists of predatory conduct designed to facilitate later sexual activity with a child. Many perpetrators of sexual offenses against children purposely create relationships with victims, their families or caretakers to create a situation that would facilitate abuse.

Grooming has been classified as part of improper sexual

abuse, which is the behavior of an adult when he or she asks or encourages a minor, through any electronic means, to send or display photographs or recordings of himself of herself of a sexual nature. The modality is an adopted term to describe the way in which some people approach children and young people through technology to gain their trust, create emotional ties and abuse them sexually.

The governor said Puerto Rico is not entirely without legislation that addresses the phenomenon of so-called “grooming.” Article 124 of the Penal Code provides that any person who knowingly uses any electronic means of communication to seduce or convince a minor to meet in person, for the purpose of engaging in prohibited sexual conduct, shall incur a serious crime with a fixed jail sentence of eight years.

Through the amendment to Article 124 of the Penal Code, it will not be necessary for a meeting with the aggressor or for the minor to facilitate or show pornographic material. It will be enough for the consummation of the crime that the intentional conduct of the author is demonstrated to contact, seduce, persuade, induce, attract, tempt, manipulate, coerce or convince the minor through any means of communication to achieve the stated purpose. The new modality included will have the same eight-year prison sen-

tence established in Article 124 of the Penal Code. In addition, it is established that if the offender, in committing the crime also hides his identity or age, the penalty of imprisonment will be 12 years.

Recently, there were reports of a large number of women, mostly minors, who were victims of sexual harassment on social networks. From these alarming complaints, it appears that the practice of grooming is not foreign to Puerto Rico.

In this sense, the governor asked the authorities to inquire about the pattern of sexual harassment by some alleged businessmen.

The victims reported that, in many cases, these people found their profiles on social networks and began to engage in conversations with them, offering them jobs as an excuse to coordinate personal encounters.

“We are giving more claws to our public law and order [policy] so officials can face this modality that serves as a vehicle for approaching minors to sexually victimize them,” Vázquez said.

“Likewise, we broaden its scope to criminalize the mere fact of contacting, seducing, persuading, inducing, attracting, tempting, manipulating, coercing or convincing a minor through any means of communication, the internet, telephone, social networks or to meet the person, in order to engage in sexual conduct prohibited by our legal system.”

6

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

PREPA urged to move forward with rooftop solar systems

By THE STAR STAFF

A

n organization that comprises groups that promote the use of solar energy asked the governing board of the bankrupt Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) to begin a participatory and transparent process that would focus on the installation of solar panels on rooftops to generate electricity instead of on the construction of solar farms.

Queremos Sol wants PREPA to take steps to acquire equipment that takes advantage of the abundance of resources in terms of roofs and solar energy storage systems, which can be installed immediately by dozens of PREPA employees already trained in renewable energy technology, in collaboration with community groups.

The petition is in response to PREPA’s express intention to advance the goal of generating all energy from renewable sources by 2050, based on megaprojects that would negatively impact farmland of high ecological value.

“Our studies show that the cost of generating photovoltaic electricity on roofs is by far cheaper than the price PREPA will

pay for photovoltaic solar energy from large farms,” Agustín Irizarry, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and one of the island’s leading authorities on energy issues, said in a statement Monday.

PREPA recently said it had signed some 16 power purchase agreements, most of them consisting of solar power farms.

Irizarry said “the cost of generating solar energy on rooftops decreases over time.”

“In contrast, the price of renewable energy on large farms increases over time because the contracts announced by PREPA lead to an increase of 2 percent per year,” he said. “To this cost we must add around 5 cents, the cost of PREPA’s basic rate.”

The group noted that the projects favored by PREPA would compromise fertile agricultural lands at a time when Puerto Rico needs to expand its food security resources and protect its ecology.

“Most of the proposed large solar installations are located on land of agricultural or natural value,” said Ingrid M.

Vila Biaggi, president of Cambio, one of the proponents of Queremos Sol. “We have enough space on the roofs to generate electricity, so we reject the use of fertile land and land of ecological value for solar projects. Decisions cannot be made in a vacuum. The crisis we are facing with the COVID-19 pandemic shows us the importance of securing land for the country’s food security and reiterates the close relationship between

environmental conditions and public health.”

The group emphasized that the destruction of the electrical transmission and distribution system by Hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico without electricity despite the fact that the generation system was working. This demonstrates the need to develop renewable rooftop projects that directly benefit communities, the members of Queremos Sol said.

Puerto Rican veterans memorial in Boston vandalized

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

P

uerto Rican veterans were outraged by the desecration of a Puerto Rican veterans memorial in the South End of Boston over the weekend, the Boston Herald reported Monday.

The veterans memorial was vandalized on the eve of Memorial Day, with two stones damaged, including one knocked over, and a Puerto Rican flag lowered.

“Workers on Sunday attempted to fix one of the stones near the entrance of the plaza at 1140 Washington St.,” said the Herald report. “Tony Molina, president of the Puerto Rican Veterans Monument Square Association, estimated the piece of granite weighed over 1,000 pounds.” “[It’s] disrespectful not because this is a Puerto Rican veterans memorial, this is a monument for veterans who gave their lives,” Molina told the Herald on

Sunday. “Whoever did it doesn’t realize it’s because of us veterans he can do that.”

“The damage was reported at 11:30 a.m. Sunday morning, according to Boston police,” the Herald article said.

“The statue in the plaza, featuring a male and female soldier, was not alleged to have been vandalized.”

According to the report, Molina is “a Marine Corps veteran who was the first Puerto Rican wounded in Vietnam in 1965.” He told the Herald that “the first portion of the memorial was dedicated in 1999 before the statue was unveiled in 2013.”

“The important thing about this, [and what] people don’t realize, [is that] Puerto Ricans have fought in every single war for this country since the Revolutionary War,” Molina told the Herald. “And per capita, Puerto Ricans have lost more men than any other state.”

“Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn, a Navy veteran who also saw a World

War II monument in his neighborhood vandalized last year with oil, called the action disrespectful,” said the Herald.

“On the eve of Memorial Day, for the men and women that paid the

supreme sacrifice for our country, it’s very insulting,” Flynn told the Herald.

Robert Santiago, the city’s deputy commissioner at the Mayor’s Office of Veterans’ Services, called the damage disheartening, the report said.

“I don’t understand why somebody would do something like that,” Santiago, a Puerto Rican and a Navy veteran, said Sunday.

Santiago told the Herald that the statue would be fixed before an event at noon on Memorial Day with elected officials.

“Boston police are investigating the incident, including review of a nearby camera pointed toward the park,” the report said.

A Boston Police Department spokesman said on Sunday afternoon that “police detectives and the city’s Civil Rights Unit were investigating the incident,” the Herald reported.

Molina told the newspaper that he and other veterans would like to talk with the person or people who vandalized the plaza.

“I’d love to see to find out who did it,” Molina said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

7

Trump tweets and golfs, but makes no mention of virus’s toll

By PETER BAKER

A

s President Donald Trump’s motorcade pulled into his golf club in Virginia on an overcast Sunday, a small group of protesters waited outside the entrance. One held up a sign.

“I care do U?” it read. “100,000 dead.”

Trump and his advisers have said that he does, but he has made scant effort to demonstrate it this Memorial Day weekend.

He finally ordered flags lowered to half-staff at the White House only after being badgered to do so by his critics and otherwise took no public notice as the American death toll from the coronavirus pandemic approached a staggering 100,000.

While the country neared six digits of death, the president who repeatedly criticized his predecessor for golfing during a crisis spent the weekend on the links for the first time since March.

When he was not zipping around on a cart, he was on social media embracing fringe conspiracy theories, amplifying messages from a racist and sexist Twitter account and lobbing playground insults at perceived enemies, including his own former attorney general.

This was a death toll that Trump once predicted would never be reached. In late February, he said there were only 15 coronavirus cases in the United States, understating even then the actual number, and declared that “the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” In the annals of the American presidency, it would be hard to recall a more catastrophically wrong prediction. Even after he later acknowledged that it would not be zero, he insisted the death toll would fall “substantially below the 100,000” mark.

As it stands now, the coronavirus has infected 1.6 million and taken so many lives it is as if an entire midsize American city — say Boca Raton, Florida, just to pick an example — simply disappeared. The toll is about to match the 100,000 killed in the United States by the pandemic of 1968 and is closing in on the outbreak of 1957-58, which killed 116,000. At this pace, it will stand as the country’s deadliest public health disaster since the great influenza of 1918-20 — all at the same time the nation confronts the most severe economic collapse since the Great Depression.

Trump, who has been sharply criticized for a slow and initially ineffective response to the pandemic, focused Sunday on the more recent progress, looking ahead, not behind. “Cases, numbers and deaths are going down all over the Country!” he exulted on Twitter.

Even that was not completely true. While total new cases nationally have begun declining, hospitalizations outside New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have increased slightly in recent days, as Trump’s own former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, pointed out.

Altogether, cases are falling in 14 states and Washington, D.C., but holding steady in 28 states and Guam while rising in eight states plus Puerto Rico, according to a New York Times database. The American Public Health Association said the 100,000 milestone was a time to reinforce efforts to curb the virus, not abandon them.

“This is both a tragedy and a call to action,” it said in a statement. “Infection rates are slowing overall in the U.S., but with 1.6 million cases across the nation in the past four months, the outbreak is far from over. New hot spots are showing up daily, and rates remain steady in at least 25 states.”

And even that grim total barely begins to scratch the surface

Coffins in one of the viewing rooms at a funeral home in Elmhurst. of the pain and suffering endured by a country under siege by the worst public health crisis combined with the worst economic crisis in decades.

“It’s a milestone to reflect on the fact that even those who didn’t die got sick, to reflect on the sacrifices people made to stay home, the sacrifices of the health care workers who shouldn’t have had to sacrifice,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Most importantly, it should lead us to take this seriously. It’s 100,000, but it looks like we’re still at the beginning of this pandemic.”

The White House on Sunday expressed condolences on the president’s behalf.

“President Trump’s prayers for comfort and strength are with all of those grieving the loss of a loved one or friend as a result of this unprecedented plague, and his message to this great nation remains one of resilience, hope and optimism,” said Judd Deere, a spokesman.

For the president, the emphasis now is on recovery, not tragedy, as he urges the country to reopen the shuttered economy and return to some form of public life. While he will travel to Baltimore on Monday to mark Memorial Day and pay tribute to fallen troops — and perhaps the virus victims — he was sending a different signal by golfing two days in a row, telling the nation that it was all right to leave home, head to the course, attend church, frolic on the beach and get back to work.

He deals with the death count in clinical terms, making forecasts quickly overtaken by reality, then declaring that the new

reality is better than it could have been. In effect, he is making a grim political argument, asserting success if the final toll turns out to be anything less than the most extreme 2.2 million fatalities predicted if the country had done nothing at all to respond.

At the White House last week, Trump took credit again for limiting travel from China in early February. “We would have lost millions of lives if we didn’t,” he said. “Think of it: If we lost 100,000 lives, the minimum we would have lost is a million-two, a million-three, a million-five maybe. But take it to a million. So that would mean 10 times more than we lost already.”

The president’s critics said he would not be able to convince voters this fall that he should be celebrated for a death toll of 100,000 or more just because it could have been worse.

“It’s not the moving of the goal posts on loss of life that hurts Trump as much as the loss of life itself,” said Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster and principal at the firm GBAO. “The facts are what worry people — majorities hold Trump responsible for high death tolls, high unemployment and a lack of testing. And even more now than a month ago.”

Republicans, though, have argued that voters will blame China for not being more forthcoming about the virus and see the rest through the lens of their preexisting views of Trump. “Mostly, I think this will wind up falling on our normal partisan lines,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican operative. “If you hate Trump, you won’t find anything he did to be right. If you love Trump, you will find the media and Democratic governors at fault for overhyping and overreacting.”

8

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

As Trump pushes for reopenings, congregations choose safety over haste

President Trump urged governors on Friday to allow houses of worship to reopen immediately.

By RICK ROJAS and ELIZABETH DIAS

F

or the first time in weeks, Jason Dees looked out as he preached Sunday and saw faces, instead of just a camera lens. The group of Christ Covenant Church worshippers was considerably smaller than before the coronavirus pandemic — 40 people this week, wearing masks as they sang and prayed, a small fraction of the congregation’s 500 members — but they were there.

“This is good for our souls,” Dees, the church’s senior pastor, said. “This is right.

This is good.”

Still, he told the gathering that it would be several weeks more, and maybe longer, before the entire congregation could be back together again. Most would have to continue watching online.

He and other pastors at Christ Covenant in Atlanta had drawn elaborate plans for reopening, talking to health professionals and other religious leaders. This was just the first phase.

The deliberations reflected the broader tension in religious congregations between the desire to worship together and fear of the consequences if they did not do so safely.

For the most part, churches across the country have not yet thrown open their doors.

Instead, as in so many sectors of American life that have been disrupted, religious communities are stepping gingerly toward the post-shutdown world.

The coming days bring a significant

test. Many houses of worship have laid the groundwork for returning, and expect to resume some form of in-person worshipping next week.

“Every church I know is working through a staging plan,” Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, said in a statement, “telling their members what bench marks they are looking for to know when to regather, how they will then phase that regathering in, and what steps they will take to ensure safety when they do.”

The discourse has grown increasingly political. Conservative churches in states under stay-at-home orders have pushed back against restrictions on worship, and President Donald Trump weighed in on behalf of one of his key constituencies, threatening Friday to try to overrule governors who refuse to allow houses of worship to open.

“Some governors have deemed the liquor stores and abortion clinics as essential, but have left out churches and other houses of worship,” Trump said. “It’s not right. So I am correcting this injustice and calling houses of worship essential.”

Some faith leaders found a measure of comfort in the president’s words, hearing an acknowledgment of religious liberties and an affirmation of the central role worship holds in the lives of millions, especially at a time of confusion, pain and loss. Still, many are preaching caution. Though religious services have already been allowed to resume in more

than half the states, many congregations have decided to remain closed for the present.

“The government simply cannot tell any religious entity how to operate,” said Jason Cruise, the senior pastor at ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee, adding that his remark applies to the federal government as well as “rogue mayors and rogue governors across the land who were literally trashing the Constitution.”

His congregation, which typically has more than 800 people in its weekly services, is reopening next Sunday with social distancing rules. Masks will be optional.

“Here’s the phrase we keep using: Use your own judgment,” Cruise said. “If you want to come back, come back. If you don’t want to wear a mask, don’t wear a mask. We’ve tried to empower people. You’re a grown adult. You know what’s best for you.”

Even so, there were fears of grave consequences. Houses of worship have the potential to help the virus spread widely through a community, given the close quarters, robust choirs and rituals like communion. Many churches, including mainline Protestant denominations, have congregations that skew older, a demographic especially vulnerable to the virus.

In March, the first confirmed coronavirus case in Washington, D.C., was an Episcopal pastor who had celebrated communion for hundreds of worshippers before his diagnosis was confirmed. In May, health officials reported a high COVID-19 rate at a church in Arkansas where two people had attended services and Bible study sessions in March.

Thirty-five of the 92 people who attended the same events caught the virus, and three died; they in turn were linked to at least 26 more cases and one death in the community.

A Catholic church in Houston reopened May 2 for limited Mass, but closed again after five leaders tested positive for the virus last weekend, following the death of a priest who had received a diagnosis of pneumonia.

Many houses of worship are pushing ahead with reopening. They have been mapping out new seating arrangements or foot traffic flow, and canceling fellowship hours and other events where congregants might have been tempted to mingle in enclosed spaces.

In California, more than 1,200 pastors have pledged to hold services for the Pentecost next Sunday, challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive order limiting such gatherings.

A Pentecostal church in Chula Vista, near San

Diego, mounted a legal battle, arguing that the governor’s order violates their right to freely assemble, but the governor’s order has so far been upheld in court.

Trump’s message has also had an impact: On Saturday, Minnesota announced that it would lift restrictions and allow houses of worship to open at 25% of capacity, if they follow public health guidelines. Some Catholic and Lutheran leaders had said they would return to in-person worship next week in defiance of Gov. Tim Walz’s previous order limiting group gatherings.

The National Council of Churches, a partnership of 38 Christian denominations, planned to hold a virtual memorial service Sunday evening. It was aimed mainly at acknowledging the grief caused by the virus as the U.S. death toll nears a grim marker of 100,000. But organizers have also cast it as a quiet rebuke of the president and others who they fear are moving too hastily and injecting politics into a process where it should not be a consideration.

“This has been weaponized to become a wedge in politics, and also in culture wars,” said Bishop Elizabeth A. Eaton, the presiding prelate of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. “No one is depriving us of our religious freedom.”

For many Muslims, this year’s Eid al-Fitr, the festival of breaking the fast, closed a difficult Ramadan. A time of family gatherings and crowded mosques was devoid of those things this year. Many religious centers opted instead to stream Eid prayers online.

“We still tried to make the best of it,” said Dzemal Bijedic, a Muslim police chaplain who helps run the charity arm of the Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis, known as House of Goods. “Everything is a test from God. It kind of teaches us to remember those who don’t have anything, who struggle on a daily basis.”

Umar Lee, a volunteer with House of Goods, said that this Ramadan has helped put things in perspective for him. “At the end of the day, we’re eating, we’ve got good St. Louis tap water, and we’re comfortable,” said Lee, 45.

There is one point of widespread agreement: Religious community has a physical component, but ultimately its meaning is far deeper.

“That unity, you cannot dissolve that,” Eaton said just after signing off from a virtual service Sunday. “Not even a little thing like a pandemic can break us apart.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

9

CDC warns of ‘aggressive’ rats searching for food during shutdowns

By MARIEL PADILLA

H

umans are not the only ones who miss dining out.

As restaurants and other businesses have closed during the coronavirus pandemic, rats may become more aggressive as they hunt for new sources of food, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned.

Environmental health and rodent control programs may see an increase in service requests related to “unusual or aggressive” rodent behavior, the agency said on its website on Thursday.

“The rats are not becoming aggressive toward people, but toward each other,” Bobby Corrigan, an urban rodentologist who has both a master’s degree and Ph.D. in rodent pest management, said Sunday.

“They’re simply turning on each other.”

Corrigan said there are certain colonies of rats in New York that have depended on restaurants’ nightly trash for hundreds of generations, coming out of the sewers and alleys to ravage the bags left on the streets. With the shutdown, all of that went away, leaving rats hungry and desperate.

In New Orleans, hordes of rats took over the streets after people emptied out.

Hundreds of thousands of rats in Chicago have started boldly searching for food, traveling farther and during the daytime.

Some have even moved into car engines.

Corrigan said pest control profes-

As restaurants and other businesses have closed during the coronavirus pandemic, rats may become more aggressive as they hunt for new sources of food, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned. sionals in the city have sent him photos of rodent cannibalization and slaughter.

“They are going to war with each other, eating each other’s young in some populations and battling each other for the food they can find,” Corrigan said. “But the rats that live and eat in residential blocks probably haven’t noticed a single bit of difference during the shutdown.”

To keep hungry rodents at bay, the CDC recommended sealing access to

homes and businesses, removing debris, keeping garbage in tightly covered bins and removing pet and bird food from yards.

Corrigan said the CDC’s latest guidance should put homeowners on alert.

Whether in rural America or in urban areas, people who don’t ordinarily see rats might start noticing them.

“You’d be smart to ask yourself: How do I do my trash and does how I do it completely deny a wild animal?” he said.

“And look at the base of your door. Get out a ruler to see if there’s a space below the door — half an inch will let them in.”

Michael H. Parsons, a visiting research scholar at Fordham University studying how rats are migrating en masse from areas near closed restaurants, delis and arenas to new environments, said rats usually don’t travel far for food and water.

This minimizes the risk of them being seen by people and predators, he said.

But in recent weeks, pest control professionals have seen more rats venturing out during daytime hours and entering homes that had not previously seen rodent activity, Jim Fredericks, the chief entomologist for the National Pest Management Association, said Sunday.

Suburban neighborhoods, often adjacent to shopping centers and other businesses, are also seeing new infestations, he said.

Fredericks said there is no evidence that rats can be infected with COVID-19 or that they can spread it to humans. Still, they are a public health risk. Rats can transmit other diseases and a professional should be called if an infestation occurs, he said.

Once the restaurants reopen, the rats will return to their reliable food sources.

Fredericks said he does not expect the overall rat population to be significantly affected by the shutdowns.

“They’re resilient,” he said. “Rats are good at being pests.”

Trump threatens to pull Republican convention from North Carolina

By MAGGIE HABERMAN

P

resident Donald Trump on Monday threatened to yank the Republican National Convention from Charlotte, North Carolina, where it is scheduled to be held in August, accusing the state’s Democratic governor of being in a “shutdown mood” that could prevent a fully attended event.

The president tweeted that he had “LOVE” for North Carolina, a swing state that he won in 2016, but he added that without a “guarantee” from the governor,

Roy Cooper, “we would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democrat Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space.”

Trump wrote that if Cooper did not provide an answer “immediately,” he would “be reluctantly forced to find, with all of the jobs and economic development it brings, another Republican National Convention site. This is not something I want to do.”

Separately, in an interview on “Fox

& Friends,” Vice President Mike Pence said that without guarantees from North Carolina, Republicans might need to move the convention to a state further along in the reopening process.

The New York Times reported last week that Republicans were quietly discussing the possibility of a pared-down convention. Trump has wondered aloud to several aides why the convention can’t be held in a hotel ballroom in Florida, a state with a Republican governor that is further along in relaxing restrictions related to the coronavirus.

Republicans are contractually bound by a 2018 agreement to hold the convention in Charlotte. But Cooper and Vi Lyles, the mayor of Charlotte, have said they will let health experts determine whether the convention can be safely held Aug. 24-27.

Lyles has said her primary concern is the city’s “vulnerable populations” who could fall ill from the virus.

Even before Monday, Trump made clear that he would blame Cooper and Lyles, who is also a Democrat, if the convention is altered or modified.

10

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Florida law restricting felon voting is unconstitutional, judge rules

Floridians voted in 2018 to restore voting rights to most felons who have completed their sentences.

By PATRICIA MAZZEI

A

Florida law requiring people with serious criminal convictions to pay court fines and fees before they can register to vote is unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Sunday, declaring that such a requirement would amount to a poll tax and discriminate against felons who cannot afford to pay.

Florida did not explicitly impose a poll tax, Judge Robert L. Hinkle of the U.S. District Court in Tallahassee wrote, but by conditioning felons’ voting rights to fees that fund the routine operations of the criminal justice system, it effectively created “a tax by any other name.”

“The Twenty-Fourth Amendment precludes Florida from conditioning voting in federal elections on payment of these fees and costs,” Hinkle wrote, calling the restriction an unconstitutional “pay-to-vote system.”

The judge granted a permanent injunction to civil rights groups that challenged the law as discriminatory for the majority of felons, many of whom are indigent. The state is expected to appeal. However, much of Sunday’s ruling is built on a previous ruling by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, which would hear any appeal.

“This really is a landmark decision for voting rights,” said Julie Ebenstein, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that sued. “It’s a de-

cision that will likely affect hundreds of thousands of voters — and it’s been a long time coming.”

Whether the decision will have immediate electoral impact is unclear.

With the November presidential election looming, voter registration groups will now likely redouble their efforts to sign up people released from prison after felony convictions. Major elections in Florida are frequently decided by razor-thin margins, and expanding the electorate by even a modest number of new voters could prove decisive.

The appeals court fast-tracked its earlier decision in the case, knowing that the election is approaching. But, with an appeal likely — and legal and political steps beyond that uncertain — it’s too early to assume that people affected by the ruling will be able to register to vote in time for November — or how many will vote even if they do.

The Florida secretary of state, who oversees elections, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Sunday’s ruling.

For decades, all Florida felons were barred from the ballot box. But in 2018, voters approved a landmark measure known as Amendment 4, automatically restoring voting rights for people who have completed their sentences for felonies other than murder or sex crimes.

The Republican-controlled Legislature then adopted a new restriction — that felons had to settle their financial

obligations to the court before having their eligibility to vote restored. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed it into law last year. The state’s lawyers argued that voters knew when they supported Amendment 4, the measure restoring voting rights, that felons would have to pay their outstanding debts before becoming eligible to vote.

But the judge roundly rejected that argument — and noted that the state has no uniform way to let felons know how much they owe or have already paid.

“Surely very few Florida voters knew that every Florida felony conviction results in an order to pay hundreds of dollars in fees and costs intended to fund the government, even when the judge does not choose to impose a fine as part of the punishment and there is no victim to whom restitution is owed,” Hinkle wrote in his 125-page opinion.

“Surely very few Florida voters knew that fees and costs were imposed regardless of ability to pay, that the overwhelming majority of felons who would otherwise be eligible to vote under Amendment 4 owed amounts they were unable to pay, and that the State had no ability to determine who owed how much.”

He upbraided Florida for failing to come up with a satisfactory way for felons to check how much they might owe or show the state that they could not afford to pay.

The judge ordered the division of elections to issue a form with which felons might request an advisory opinion on their eligibility to vote. The felon would then be able to register to vote within 21 days unless the division finds that the applicant is ineligible.

Hinkle temporarily blocked the restriction in October, a decision later affirmed by appeals court. Hinkle then held an unusual bench trial via video conference in late April and early May. The coronavirus pandemic had made it unwise for lawyers and witnesses to appear in court in person.

At the end of the eight-day trial, the judge said he would rule, as he did last year, that Florida could not refuse to restore a felon’s voting rights if the felon was unable to pay legal obligations. Several other legal questions remained to be decided during the trial, including claims that the law would amount to racial discrimination.

Ultimately, the judge ruled that the plaintiffs did not show that race “was a motivating factor” in the law. Neither was gender, he ruled.

During the trial, Hinkle did agree with lawyers for the state when they said that there was no evidence to show that legislators intended to cause a racial disparity when they adopted the fee payback requirement. But the judge also noted there was nonetheless a clear “racial impact,” because so many Florida felons are black or Latino.

The judge during the trial had pressed Mohammad O. Jazil, a lawyer for the Florida secretary of state, the official who oversees elections, about possible partisan motives.

“Why is it that all the Republicans voted ‘yes’ and all the Democrats voted ‘no’?” Hinkle said. “That is not a coincidence. It would be stunning if somebody told me that they did not realize that African Americans tend to vote Democratic more than Republican.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

11

Plant-based ‘meats’ catch on in the pandemic

By AMELIA NIERENBERG

rians. But in the past year, substitutes made with plantbased protein have shown up in fine-dining and fasthe news for the American meat industry over food restaurants; even some large meat companies the past month has not been good. Slaughterhave started producing them. Although their creation houses closed as the coronavirus sickened and involves complex alchemy, some plant-based meats killed workers. Even after President Donald Trump can cook up and taste just like ground beef. declared meat processing plants “critical infrastructuEven before the coronavirus, interest in plantre,” hundreds of Wendy’s restaurants ran out of hambased meat was rising. From late December to early burgers. As meat-processing plants have shut down, January, before the virus hit, sales of plant-based meat farmers have had to kill hundreds of thouwere up 30% over the same period a year sands of pigs. earlier, according to the Nielsen data. Meat That hasn’t slowed demand for meat. sales increased about 1% during that same Sales from April 12 to May 9 were 28% period. higher than in the four weeks ending Jan. Now, for the first time, plant-based 18, before the first reported case of coromeats are often competitive in price with navirus in the United States, according to ground beef, and sometimes easier to find, data from Nielsen. as fears of meat shortages prompt bulk buying.

But the meat industry’s troubles may During the pandemic, Monia Laurethave provided a boost for plant-based ti, 47, has been doing her grocery shopping meat substitutes, which had a jump of online at Instacart. She is a pescatarian, but 35% in sales during the same period. (The her family eats meat. The website had put increase just for uncooked products was a cap on the amount of burgers she could more dramatic: 53% for the vegan products versus 34% for meat.) buy — just one package per family. Then To meet the demand, Impossible she saw a pop-up ad for the Beyond Burger.

“I wondered, what is this? I’ve never Foods has been hiring more workers, increasing pay and adding more shifts. Beseen this before,” said Lauretti, a stay-atyond Meat reported record sales in the home parent on the Upper West Side of first quarter of this year.

Manhattan. “They taste like normal beef Those companies’ new generation of burgers, and they are delicious.” Her plant-based alternatives — developed in 16-year-old son, Alessandro Dal Bon, liked laboratories, with long lists of unfamiliar them, too. So she’ll buy them again. ingredients — had been slowly catching Impossible Foods, which before the on with consumers. But some say that pandemic sold more of its products in reports of illness among meat-processing restaurants than in grocery stores, has expanded its retail footprint. Brown said his workers have made them even more curious. products are now sold in more than 3,000 Before the pandemic, William Thostores, up from fewer than 200 in January. mas, 19, usually bought ground beef and Its workforce of 653 full-time employees is chicken on his weekly shopping trip near up from 587 in January. his home in Brookline, New Hampshire.

In the first quarter of the year, Beyond Since April, he has been buying plant-baMeat, whose stock is publicly traded, resed meat instead. “I’d always been trying ported net revenue of $97.1 million, an increase of 141% over last year. Its products to block out a lot of what was going on behind the scenes of the meat industry, but I are now in 25,000 grocery stores nationwide, and the company recently expanded can’t ignore it forever,” he said. into China.

Thomas, who is currently unemployed, is now eating a mostly vegetarian diet “We were saying that by 2030, Beyond Meat could have a $1 billion in safor the first time in his life. les,” said Alexia Howard, the senior re“With the pandemic around, a lot of search analyst of U.S. food at Bernstein, the industries, you know, not taking the an equity research group. “Now, we’re saproper precautions to make sure everyone is safe, I feel like that would probably also As the meat industry struggles to respond to the outbreak, makers of vegan ying by the end of 2020, which is only 18 substitutes are ramping up production to meet new interest from shoppers. months later.” go in toward the products,” he said.

T

Impossible Foods’ plant in Oakland, California, has not yet had any coronavirus cases, said the chief executive, Pat Brown. No cases have been reported at the North Carolina factory of Atlantic Natural Foods, which makes the Loma Linda line of plant-based foods, said Doug Hines, the company’s founder.

For years, plant-based meat alternatives, typically made of vegetables, legumes and grains, were widely considered of interest mostly to vegans and vegeta-

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Stocks

Investors look beyond drug makers as hunt for COVID-19 treatment heats up

I

nvestors are diversifying bets in the healthcare sector, as the rush to develop treatments for Covid-19 has driven up prices for some pharmaceutical stocks.

A record 48% of fund managers are overweight healthcare stocks, a BofA survey showed, and the S&P 500 healthcare sector is up nearly 34% since its March low. Hopes for a treatment have also sparked outsize rallies in the shares of companies such as Moderna and Inovio Pharmaceutcials, up 253% and 327% since the start of the year, respectively, as of Friday’s close.

In recent weeks, news of potential treatments or vaccines to fight the pandemic have occasionally fueled swings in broader markets.

Yet some fund managers believe lasting profits may be elusive for vaccine-makers, leading them to seek corners of the healthcare sector that could see longer-term benefits from the fight against coronavirus.

Large pharmaceutical companies such as Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline Plc have said they plan to make any successful vaccine available at cost, though they could reap profits later if a seasonal shot is needed.

Multiple treatments could also divide the market between many players, investors said.

“There’s the question of ‘Does anyone really make a lot of money on this?,” said Larry Cordisco, co-portfolio manager of the Osterweis Fund.

Signs of progress on potential treatments could bolster the case for a quicker economic recovery and further fuel the rally that has boosted the S&P 500 around 30% from its late March lows. In the next two weeks, Gilead Sciences is expected to announce results of clinical studies of its potential coronavirus treatment remdesivir for patients with moderate symptoms of Covid-19. Pfizer has said it expects to release safety data for initial human testing of experimental vaccine by the end of May. Cordisco is looking further afield. One of the companies he owns is medical device maker Danaher Corp, which manufactures a rapid Covid-19 test the FDA approved in March. Its shares are up 3.1% since the start of the year.

“If you’re looking for where the profits might be in the chain, it’s somebody like that who is going to benefit.

They can cash in the whole way,” Cordisco said.

Alessandro Valentini, portfolio manager at Causeway Capital Management, said his firm is looking for value opportunities as the healthcare sector becomes more expensive, trading now at 22.9 times trailing earnings, slightly more than the 21.9 multiple of the S&P 500 index as a whole.

MOST ASSERTIVE STOCKS

PUERTO RICO STOCKS

COMMODITIES

CURRENCY

LOCAL PERSONAL LOAN RATES Bank

LOCAL MORTGAGE RATES Bank

FHA 30-YR POINTS CONV 30-YR POINTS

BPPR Scotia CooPACA Money House First Mort Oriental

3.00% 0.00 3.50% 0.00 3.50% 2.00 3.75% 2.00 3.50% 0.00 3.50% 0.00

3.50% 000 4.00% 0.00 3.75% 2.00 3.75% 2.00 5.50% 0.00 3.75% 5.50

PERS.

CREDIT CARD

AUTO

BPPR --.-- 17.95 4.95 Scotia 4.99 14.99 4.99 CooPACA

6.95 9.95

2.95

Reliable

--.-- --.--

4.40

First Mort 7.99 --.-- --.-Oriental 4.99 11.95 4.99

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

13

Why China’s move to rein in Hong Kong is just the start

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

C

hina’s move to strip away another layer of Hong Kong’s autonomy was not a rash impulse. It was a deliberate act, months in the making. It took into account the risks of international umbrage and reached the reasonable assumption that there would not be a significant geopolitical price to pay.

As a provocative move, it is just the latest.

With the world distracted by the coronavirus pandemic’s devastating toll, China has taken a series of aggressive actions in recent weeks to flex its economic, diplomatic and military muscle across the region.

China’s coast guard rammed and sank a fishing boat in disputed waters off Vietnam, and its ships swarmed an offshore oil rig operated by Malaysia. Beijing denounced the second inauguration of Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, and pointedly dropped the word “peaceful” from its annual call for unification with the island democracy.

Chinese troops squared off again last week with India’s along their contentious border in the Himalayas.

All are long-standing tensions, but the decision to impose new national security laws on Hong Kong, bypassing the semi-autonomous territory’s own legislative process, shows what can happen with an unbridled China, no longer restrained by the fear of international rebuke.

“There was this idea before about China being cautious and trying to cultivate its soft power around the world,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and author of “China Tomorrow: Democracy or Dictatorship?” “Those times are gone with Xi Jinping.”

Xi, who in seven years in power has pursued a “great rejuvenation” of the Chinese state, has emerged from the pandemic newly emboldened, seizing on nationalistic themes to deflect from the government’s early failures in stopping the coronavirus’s spread.

But he still faces enormous economic and diplomatic challenges. New protests erupted in Hong Kong on Sunday, and resistance to greater control by Beijing could threaten the territory’s role as a financial center.

Officials and state media outlets have lashed out at the United States and other countries, accusing them of supporting “sepa-

With the world distracted by the pandemic’s devastating toll, China has taken a series of aggressive actions in recent weeks to flex its economic, diplomatic and military muscle across the region. ratists” and “terrorists” in an effort to weaken the power of the Communist Party.

On the defensive over their handling of the virus, President Donald Trump and his aides have sought to blame China for the pandemic’s toll in the United States. The criticism, by all appearances, has done little to moderate Xi’s actions. It may even have emboldened them, as Chinese officials point to the failures in the United States and other countries as evidence of the Communist Party’s better model of governance.

Xi’s move against Hong Kong has nonviolent echoes of President Vladimir Putin’s forceful seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, which was a violation of international law and of Russia’s previous diplomatic commitments. The annexation made Putin an international pariah for a while, but Russia still remains firmly in control of Crimea.

While Xi is using legislation rather than military force in a territory already under Chinese rule, it is nonetheless a brash move by an autocratic leader willing to risk international condemnation to resist what he views as foreign encroachment on his country’s security.

“The Communist Party doesn’t care anymore about the reactions because it’s about survival, the stability of the one-party system, avoiding the fate of the Soviet Union,” Cabestan said. “Hong Kong is being perceived more

and more as a base of surveillance, as a factor in the destabilization of the Chinese state.”

The challenges facing Xi come at a time when China’s major rivals, the United States above all, are in disarray, giving Xi more room to maneuver.

Britain, which is a signatory to the 1984 treaty that promised Hong Kong — its former colony — basic freedoms until 2047, issued a statement with Australia and Canada saying that they were “deeply concerned.”

Senior Trump administration officials also denounced Xi’s gambit, warning that they could reconsider the territory’s special trade privileges or impose other sanctions. Trump, whose few comments about Hong Kong have been inconsistent, said little.

For those who support Hong Kong’s unique status as Asia’s commercial and cultural crossroads, warnings no longer suffice in the face of determined pressure from Beijing.

Victoria Hui, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame and author of a book on the 2014 Hong Kong protests known as the Umbrella Movement, said the international community had often spoken out against China’s steady accretion of power over the territory but had exacted no real punishment.

That has been the case for the most egregious violations of basic rights in Hong

Kong in recent years, including extrajudicial kidnappings, excessive use of force by the police last year and the arrests of leading democratic leaders a week ago.

“The international pushback has been so weak,” Hui said. “Beijing is daring foreign governments to continue to issue words but take no actions.”

China’s tactics under Xi today contrast those of his immediate predecessors, who prioritized China’s reforms and opening over confrontation with its neighbors or the broader world. “Hide our strength, bide our time” was Deng Xiaoping’s adage a generation ago.

When Taiwan was moving to hold its first presidential elections in 1996, China conducted intimidating missile tests in the Taiwan Strait. It was forced to back down when President Bill Clinton ordered U.S. aircraft carriers to the waters in a show of military support for the island’s defense.

Xi has steadily built up China’s air and naval power, making a similar move by the United States today much riskier. Chinese forces routinely menace the island, as its first operational aircraft carrier did last month, forcing Taiwan’s military to scramble jets and ships. The seventh similar incident this year, it signaled China’s determination to block Taiwan from formally establishing its independence.

For Beijing’s leaders, China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong is as emotionally charged.

Under the Basic Law, the miniconstitution that governs the territory, Hong Kong is obliged to adopt rules “to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition and subversion” against the Chinese government. When the city’s legislature tried to do so in 2003, Beijing retreated in the face of huge street protests.

“China was in a very different place globally,” said Rana Mitter, director of the University of Oxford China Center. “China’s economy was growing in 2003, but it wasn’t the second-biggest economy in the world and quite the economic behemoth it is today.”

There is also a more subtle difference that the pandemic has accentuated. Beijing spent years deflecting criticism of its system by saying that China was not yet ready for more democratic freedoms, effectively leaving open the possibility for greater liberalization of the political system, as many inside and outside the country hoped.

China, Mitter said, is now a “state which no longer apologizes for being authoritarian.”

14

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Putin speaks, officials shrug, and doctors are caught in the middle

Medics don protective suits before entering the “red zone” of the Kommunarka hospital in Moscow.

By ANDREW HIGGINS

A

ssailed by critics as an absentee leader at the start of the coronavirus crisis in Russia, President Vladimir Putin reemerged with a splash on state television last month to show that he cared and was taking charge.

He promised cash bonuses of up to $1,100 a month for each doctor, nurse and other “front line” health worker involved in fighting the virus.

But for an all-powerful leader whose every word must be taken as a command, Putin has had a surprisingly hard time making his voice heard.

More than a month after he spoke, the money has yet to materialize for many. Instead, some doctors have received visits from police investigators and prosecutors demanding to know why they complained publicly about not getting their bonuses.

A promise meant to showcase Putin’s proudest achievement — the revitalization of the Russian state after the chaos of the 1990s — has sunk into a swamp of recrimination, security service intimidation and bureaucratic buck-passing.

“Is this a joke? Unfortunately, no,” Dmiti Drize, a Moscow-based human rights lawyer, wrote last week in a scathing newspaper commentary on the unfolding mess.

He said that neither Russia’s foreign foes nor its

main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, “is capable of damaging the image of the state as much as its own managers.”

The Kremlin holds more than $500 billion in various rainy day funds, so Putin has all the money he needs to deliver on his promises. But, in a system rife with corruption, many officials live in permanent fear of being criticized, or worse investigated, for spending state money not included in their previously approved budgets.

So when it came to doling out the cash, they hesitated, took the liberty of making deductions for time that health workers spent on noncoronavirus patients or perhaps skimmed some of the money.

In the southern region of Krasnodar, a widely respected head doctor at a hospital was fired after his staff staged a small protest. He is now under investigation by Russia’s equivalent of the FBI for criminal negligence.

A doctor in the nearby town of Abinsk who helped organize public complaints over nonpayment of Putin’s bonus received a letter from the police warning that he faced prosecution for “carrying out extremist activities.”

Yulia Volkova, a Krasnodar doctor who leads the local branch of Doctors’ Alliance, an independent trade union affiliated with Navalny, said medical workers had rejoiced at Putin’s promise of extra cash. Now,

though, they are “terrified of being investigated” if they complain about the president’s orders’ falling on deaf ears, she said.

In some cases, however, prosecutors have sided with protesting doctors. The prosecutor’s office in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, said last week that it had investigated complaints of nonpayment and found them justified. It ordered local authorities to pay up.

In Nizhny Novgorod, another region where many medical staff have not received the money promised, the regional health minister, David Melik-Husyenov, accused the opposition of using “dirty tricks” to expose the bureaucracy’s failures.

“Arranging such stories is very immoral,” he said.

Putin, playing one of his favorite roles as a caring but stern father of the nation undermined by bungling bureaucrats, fumed recently in a teleconference that officials in many places had not acted on his bonus order.

“I gave specific figures for these payments for doctors, for nursing staff, for all medical staff, for ambulance crews and so on,” Putin said. Instead, he continued: “They made a bureaucratic mess, counting the number of hours worked on some kind of clock. Did I instruct that you count with a watch or something? No!” He said earlier that 29 regions had ignored his order and that less than half of medical workers nationwide had received the money he had promised. Ordering officials to get with his program, Putin thundered, “I ask you to keep in mind that I will personally check the situation on this issue in every region of Russia.”

Much of the blame for unpaid bonuses has now fallen on the staff of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, who spent much of this month in the hospital recovering from COVID-19.

The prime minister complained in a conference call with officials shown on television that documents needed to turn Putin’s promise into action had not been drafted properly and left too much room for regional officials to wriggle out of paying.

Nikolai Petrov, a political scientist, dismissed Putin’s public anger and dismay over the bonuses as mostly theater.

“He is trying to show that he is the good guy,” Petrov said. “But he is losing popularity and will continue to lose it.”

An opinion poll by the Levada Center, an independent polling organization in Moscow, found that the president’s approval rating sank last month to 59%, its lowest level since he came to power in 2000. His highest approval rating, nearly 90%, came after Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

After nearly two months cooped up in his country residence outside Moscow, Putin has become so isolated, in Petrov’s view, that he “risks returning to a changed country after the pandemic is over.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

15

For some Italians, the future of work looks like the past

By JASON HOROWITZ

O

n a small farm outside Rome, workers crouched in the corridors of a cornfield and tended to stalks for the coming harvest. The ones from Morocco, Romania and Nigeria knew exactly what to do. It was the new Italian hires who needed help.

“These you have to get rid of,” the farm’s owner told Massimiliano Cassina, pointing at some cobs on the bottom of the plant.

Only weeks ago, Cassina, 52, was running a fabric company that had international clients and specialized in sports T-shirts. But the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 30,000 Italians and wrecked the national economy also dealt a deathblow to his business. Desperate for a paycheck, he became one of an increasing number of Italians seeking a future in the country’s agrarian past.

“They gave me a chance,” said Cassina, wearing a blue mask, blue rubber gloves and sweat-stained shirt.

Italy industrialized after World War II and never really looked back. But the virus has drastically reordered society and economies, locking seasonal workers in their home countries while marooning Italians who worked in retail, entertainment, fashion and other once-mighty industries.

Where until recently a return to the land seemed reserved for natural wine hipsters or gentry sowing boutique gardens with ancient seeds, more Italians are now considering the work of their grandparents as laborers on the large farms that are increasingly essential to feed a paralyzed country and continent.

Massimiliano Cassina, who ran a fabric company which was forced to close during the coronavirus panWithout them, hundreds of tons of broccoli, fava beans, fruit demic, looks over an old tractor at the farm where he works as a laborer in Corcolle, Italy, near Rome and vegetables are in danger of withering on the vine or rotting on the ground. job as a waiter, described work picking strawberries on a farm Bellanova choked up in announcing the measure, which she “The virus has forced us to rethink the models of development outside Verona. said in an interview would help integration in Italy but also fill the and the way the country works,” Teresa Bellanova, Italy’s agricultural But the transition for many has not been easy. Agricultural shortfall of laborers created by the virus. minister, who is herself a former farmhand, said in an interview. work has become as foreign to Italians as the seasonal workers Critics said that legalization would do little to compensate She said that the virus required Italy, which has remained from other countries who have filled the ranks of farm hands for for the labor shortfall, because those unauthorized workers were at the vanguard of the epidemic and its consequences in Europe, decades. already working the fields, just in exploitative conditions that to confront “a scarcity of food for many levels of the population,” Massimiliano Giansanti, president of Confagricoltura, one grossly underpaid and overworked them. Populists both in and out including unemployed young professionals, and that agriculture of Italy’s largest agricultural associations, said many of those who of the Italian government argued that the minister was exploiting needed to be “where the new generations can find a future.” were interested in the work did not have the necessary training the epidemic to further a progressive agenda.

To do that, agriculture needed to shake off the backward or experience.

Austin Okoro, 25, a Nigerian with a work permit who stigma of Europe’s preindustrial and pre-technological past and “Agriculture is not picking a red apple from a tree,” he said, picked corn with Cassina outside Rome, said his friends without emphasize its use of sophisticated technology, machinery and explaining that, far from the House and Garden idyll of the Italian legal status would jump at a job like his. But he also said that he chemistry. She said she had discussed such a shift with her French imagination, farming was a modern industry that required know- did not begrudge the Italians who had joined him in the cornfield. counterpart and the same was true for Spain and Germany and how, commitment and flexibility.

“They are doing fine,” he said with a smile. beyond as the virus laid waste to other sectors.

For now, he said, “the majority” of the Italians inquiring The main question, though, remained the absence of trai“Agriculture doesn’t mean a return to the hoe,” she said. about positions posted on the association’s Agrijob platform still ned seasonal workers and getting enough workers in time for the If Italians now need the fields to survive, the farms also considered it gardening. coming harvests. suddenly need Italians. Despite vigorous lobbying by agricultural Bruno Francescon, 45, the owner of a melon farm in ManConfagricoltura has organized flights carrying hundreds of groups to create Green Corridors to ease their arrival, about 150,000 tova, hired Italians who had worked in hotels and driven buses. Moroccan workers, paid for privately by farms, to arrive in Italy seasonal workers from Romania, Poland, India and elsewhere are He said he missed his “professionally very prepared” workers this week. A wine grower in the northern region of Alto Adige locked out of Italy. from India and Morocco. An influx of Italians, he said, “doesn’t complained that the Italians he had hired bailed on him so he At the same time, Italians, who previously constituted about compensate for the lack of skills.” And some of the Italians he chartered a flight to bring eight seasoned Romanian workers to 36% of Italy’s roughly 1 million agricultural workers, are finding hired simply “ran away.” his vineyard. their restaurants, tour companies and stores shuttered. The safer But compared with Germany, which has allowed for the This month, the Italian government set aside more than working conditions outdoors are proving attractive. So is a paycheck. 1 billion euros (about $1.1 billion) of subsidies to farmers as arrival of tens of thousands of seasonal laborers, this amounted Italy’s leading agricultural associations have set up websites part of a 55-billion-euro relief package. The measure became to a drop in the bucket. with names like Agrijob and Jobincountry and drawn more than a source of acrimonious political debate, though, because Back in the cornfield, Cassina said he missed his old life 20,000 applications, most of them from Italians, to fill the shortfall. it also included a pathway to legalization for unauthorized as he got on his hands and knees, dirtying his shorts. The farm’s “Manna from heaven,” is how Paolo Figna, 26, who lost his workers in the fields. owner, Vittorio Galasso, 62, observed his progress.

16

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Spain’s courts, already strained, face crisis as lockdown lifts

BY RAPAHEL MINDER

A

flood of new court cases, some with little precedent, is expected to deluge a Spanish judicial system already gasping for breath, bogged down by delays and lagging in technology.

In a country known for its litigiousness, lawyers and judges are bracing for a period of turmoil and disorder in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

One judge expects as many as 150,000 people to file for bankruptcy, up from a few thousand last year. Lawyers representing Spaniards who lost loved ones to the virus have already filed a lawsuit against the government, arguing that it is guilty of negligent homicide.

The country gingerly restarted court

proceedings this month after suffering one of the worst outbreaks in Europe. Now experts worry that previous attempts to overhaul Spain’s already struggling justice system will be set back even further by the pandemic and an onslaught of new virusrelated cases.

“The pandemic will expose the state of abandonment in which politicians have left the justice system,” said Javier Cremades, chairman of the law firm Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo and president of the World Jurist Association.

Litigants have complained for years about cases’ dragging out in Spanish courts. A report by the European Commission from last year showed that Spain had one of the most drawn-out processes among member states, with civil cases

A Barcelona market this month. The pandemic that has already altered daily life in Spain will also transform its legal landscape, experts say.

taking more than 200 days on average to reach initial resolutions.

Proposals to overhaul the system have been repeatedly shelved in recent years as Spain has grappled with four national elections since 2015 and long periods of government limbo.

Parliament, eyeing the backlog and the potential barrage of new cases, was stirred to act this month, approving the government’s plan to shift most court proceedings to videoconference, extend court hours and use trainees to bolster staffing.

Certain cases — people fighting insolvency or embroiled in child custody disputes, for instance — are to be prioritized.

All court proceedings were suspended in mid-March when Spain declared a state of emergency. They have slowly restarted this month, but lawyers are skeptical that enough has been done.

“If you ask me how I see the legal landscape, it will be chaotic,” said Rosalia Sicilia, a labor lawyer.

Spaniards are known for taking their disagreements to court, spurred in part by a 2008 Supreme Court ruling that allowed lawyers to collect contingency fees.

In proportion to population, the country had twice as many civil court cases as Germany and Britain, and significantly more than France and Italy, according to a 2016 study by Juan S. Mora‑Sanguinetti, a senior economist at the Bank of Spain.

Criminal cases have also lagged in Spain, at times exceeding legal limits and allowing defendants to go free. Criminal cases are not expected to rise after the pandemic — they may even ebb as Spaniards ease out of the lockdown — but if courtrooms are flooded with civil cases it will affect the criminal justice system as

well.

Improving technology and communication is crucial to dealing with the judicial crisis, said Cristina Jiménez Savurido, a judge who has taken leave to run Fide, a legal and economic think tank. She noted, for instance, that regional courts operate on incompatible computer systems.

“The computers in Catalonia simply cannot communicate with those in Madrid or the Canary Islands,” Jiménez Savurido said.

The courts have faced bureaucratic confusion as well. Judges are named by a central judicial council in Madrid, whose members are vetted by parliament, but regional governments appoint and pay other courtroom staff. Pay disparities have been a sore point: Court-appointed lawyers protested their wages outside parliament in February.

The split management will make parliament’s overhaul difficult to put into action, said Santiago Lago Peñas, a professor of economics at the University of Vigo.

“It is hard to implement a reform in a fragmented system where everybody has been defending his own space,” he said.

The delays that have dragged down the courts in better times are not likely to improve, experts say. The legal trainees enlisted to help the courts, who have passed their bar exams but have no experience, are not enough, they say. And with a ratio of 12 judges per 100,000 residents, Spain has just over half the European average.

“We need more judges, but fully qualified ones and not the trainees who the government is now suggesting could help draw up sentences,” said José María Alonso, dean of the Madrid bar association.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

17

Biden can beat Trump … if he doesn’t blow it

By CHARLES M. BLOW

A

s the United States’ death toll raced toward 100,000, Donald Trump went golfing.

The number of deaths never had to reach such a staggering figure — and it will surely climb far beyond it — but it did because in the early days, Trump made excuses for the Chinese response, dragged his feet on an American response, and repeatedly made statements that defied truth and science.

Trump put politics, his own political fortunes, over the lives of the American people, and the result has been catastrophic.

As CNN has reported, researchers at Columbia University created a model gauging transmission rates from March 15 to May 3, and found that if the United States had started social distancing just two weeks earlier, it could have prevented 84% of deaths and 82% of cases.

But Trump had spent the previous week downplaying the severity of the virus and blaming growing coverage of it and alarm over it on the media.

On March 10, when there were 959 confirmed cases and 28 deaths, Trump said to reporters after a meeting with Republican senators: “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

The very next day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, but it wasn’t until March 13 that Trump declared the virus a national emergency, and it wasn’t until March 16 that he announced social distancing guidelines.

But, that may well have been too late. The virus wasn’t aware of the politics of the moment. The virus wasn’t aware that he had been lying and deflecting.

The virus wasn’t aware that it should wait until the American president was cowed into correct action.

It was doing what viruses do: It was spreading and it was killing.

Trump dragged his feet, trying to con his way through a pandemic, to rewrite reality, to pacify the public until the virus passed, and that has led to untold numbers of people dead who never had to die.

There is not only blood on Trump’s hands, he is drenched in it like the penultimate scene from the movie “Carrie.”

No amount of deflecting blame to China or Obama or the governors can change this. No amount of playing to people’s impatience about reopening and optimistic desires that the worst is behind us can change this.

In America, this is Donald Trump’s plague,

run.” That never happened, and the NAACP had to release a statement to clarify that it “is a nonpartisan organization and does not endorse candidates for political office.”

This is not the first time Biden has lied about his relationship to the black community. He has repeatedly lied over the years about marching in the civil rights movement, even though advisers warned him to stop it. And, he repeatedly said that he was arrested in South Africa trying to see imprisoned anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela.

None of this ever happened. What gives? None of this is necessary. Compared to Trump’s avalanche of lies, these may seem small, but for black voters, particularly younger, more leery ones, they are baffling and off-putting.

Black voters rescued the Biden campaign and likely delivered him the nomination. These kinds of Former Vice President Joe Biden during a virtual town Breakfast Club flubs have the potential to dampen enthusiasm among “the one that brung you,” as we hall last month. say in the South.

Biden has a good chance to beat Trump in the and he is yoked with that going into the election in wake of his disastrous pandemic response, if Biden November. doesn’t blow it.

Joe Biden needs to do little, despite what many pundits may think. He doesn’t need a daily presence in the news. He doesn’t need to “own the internet.”

He doesn’t need large rallies or even that much sizzle.

In fact, his being stuck in his house and giving limited interviews from his basement may be the best PO BOX 6537 Caguas PR 00726 thing to ever happen to his campaign.

Biden is a well-known gaffe machine. Every Telephones: (787) 743-3346 • (787) 743-6537 time he speaks, there is the very real chance that he (787) 743-5606 • Fax (787) 743-5100 will do more damage than good. America doesn’t need that. We just need a person to replace Trump who is, for one thing, not so cavalier about deaths connected to his poor response or poor policy — whether they be hurricane victims in Puerto Rico, children separated from their parents at the border Publisher or victims of a virus.

Manuel Sierra Sharon Ramírez But, Biden continues to commit unforced error, General Manager Legal Notices Graphics Manager like the hubbub he created and later apologized for when he said at the end of an interview with The María de L. Márquez Elsa Velázquez Business Director Reporter Breakfast Club’s Charlamagne tha God: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or R. Mariani José Sánchez Fournier Trump, then you ain’t black.”

Circulation Director Reporter It was so cavalier and comfortable that it was shocking. Biden doesn’t get to define blackness nor Lisette Martínez María Rivera Advertising Agency Director Graphic Artist Manager excommunicate anyone from it.

But that wasn’t the only problem in the inRay Ruiz terview. He said just seconds after that statement Legal Notice Director that “The NAACP has endorsed me every time I’ve

Dr. Ricardo Angulo

18

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Words of Encouragement

By THE NYT EDITORIAL BOARD

T

hank you, Americans.

That hasn’t been said nearly enough over these awful last few months.

In this frightening and uncertain time, we’ve had to absorb many new and disconcerting concepts — from social distancing to flattening the curve to community transmission to case-fatality rates.

We’ve been reminded repeatedly that we aren’t doing enough to stem the spread of the coronavirus, that we are a “failed state,” unable to manage the greatest existential threat in our lifetimes. The country that calls itself exceptional has long lines at food banks, strained public health systems and millions of its own citizens wondering how they’re going to keep the lights on and their families fed.

There is no question that misinformation, mismanagement and incompetence from national, state and local leaders have cost many lives. But focusing only on failure obscures much of the good work that the vast majority of Americans have done, and are doing, to look after one another.

If we are going to get through this global crisis, we need to hear more than just what we’re doing wrong, or should be doing better. We need to hear, if only now and then, what we are doing right. And as individuals working to help the larger community, we have been doing a lot right.

This weekend, as we honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our country, it’s worth pausing to acknowledge the smaller but essential patriotic sacrifices we are all making today, for one another.

Consider that over the first six weeks of the crisis, nearly 44% of U.S. residents — roughly 144 million people — mostly stayed home, enduring inconvenience and isolation for the health and safety of not only family members, friends and neighbors, but of people they’ve never met.

Millions of Americans now routinely wear masks when we go outdoors, a group effort that was inconceivable just weeks ago. Today, nearly two-thirds of Americans agree that masking is a matter of public health. (The science, while still evolving, backs that up.)

We keep our physical distance from one another wherever possible, even when it is awkward and tiresome and runs against our most primal instincts as social mammals. In the absence of any concerts, sporting events or other organized group entertainment, we’ve come up with creative ways to entertain ourselves and one another. The creative flourishing of people forced to carry on online from the intimacy of their own homes is something to behold.

Some Americans who didn’t need their stimulus payments donated their stimulus checks to those in greater need.

This is love of country at its best, generous and communal. And it’s all the more important to keep that spirit alive as we enter the warmer months and are tempted to forget all that we have learned in this dark and deadly spring. That’s where a little encouragement from our leaders would come in handy. It could sound something like this: You’re doing great, my fellow Americans. What you have been asked to do is not easy, but you’re doing it. And you’ve already made a big difference. People are alive today who might otherwise not be, thanks to the sacrifices you have made and are continuing to make.

Thanks to you, the situation is improving in many of

the most hard-hit places, from New York to New Jersey to Louisiana. Yes, we could have limited the damage much further had lockdowns and social distancing begun sooner, but our actions have still made an enormous difference. Without stayat-home orders and widespread social distancing, one economist has estimated, our 1.6 million confirmed cases of coronavirus would be closer to 35 million.

Thanks to you, cities and towns around the country are starting the slow process of safely reopening for business. The road to normalcy will be long and difficult, and it is one we’ll travel together.

Of course, there are millions of people who never had the luxury to stay home or socially distance: the front-line workers — from doctors and nurses to grocery-store employees and mail carriers — who have kept everyone else cared for and fed throughout this pandemic. They deserve the nation’s enduring gratitude. They also deserve higher pay, better working conditions, stronger safety measures and, in many cases, all of the above.

Words of encouragement matter immensely.

There’s a reason marathon routes are lined with cheering crowds from start to finish. Managing the coronavirus is going to be a long slog, and we need regular reminders that we’re getting somewhere.

So much remains unknown about this terrible disease: why it kills some and barely grazes others; why it hits different countries differently; how it will develop over the coming months and years.

What is known is that there will be more spikes of infections, that many more people will get sick and die, and that we will be constantly working to keep people healthy while also keeping the economy running.

We also know that our own decisions, as individuals, will be vital in helping to protect our neighbors. Until there is a vaccine, which could be years from now, the simple acts of wearing a mask and practicing social distancing may be the most reliable ways to stem the spread of the disease and save more lives.

The most patriotic thing that Americans can do right now is not to carry military-style rifles to a protest that shuts down their state legislature, or to spread baseless conspiracy theories online, or to pick fights in a supermarket over reasonable public health measures. The best way to serve the nation is to do the things that we know work, and to help each other out when we fall short. That’s how we protect the most vulnerable among us, restore our economy and reinvigorate the promises at the heart of the American ideal.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

19

Autoridad de Puertos inicia subastas para mejoras en aeropuertos de Culebra y Arecibo Por THE STAR

L

a Autoridad de los Puertos (APPR) estará llevando a cabo subastas para realizar mejoras necesarias a los aeropuertos regionales de Culebra y Arecibo, representando una inversión conjunta aproximada de 11 millones de dólares, anunció el lunes el director ejecutivo interino de Puertos, Joel Pizá Batiz.

“La APPR realizó un programa de inspección de pavimentos en todos los aeropuertos, incluyendo Culebra y Arecibo. La condición de los pavimentos fue evaluada según los estándares de la Agencia Federal de Aviación (FAA) y ASTM Internacional. De la evaluación, salió a relucir que algunos aeropuertos presentaron condiciones en el pavimento que debían ser atendidas según los estándares de la industria”, explicó Pizá Batiz en comunicación escrita.

Informó que la Autoridad también identifico que varios de los artefactos de Ayudas de Navegación Visual (“Visual Aids”) habían llegado a su vida útil, por lo que estos requerían ser actualizados con tecnología de última generación para incrementar la seguridad de las aeronaves y de sus ocupantes.

Destacó que la APPR completó los planos y especificaciones para estas mejoras, y encaminó la fase de subasta para el mes que viene, para eventualmente contratar la fase de construcción en los aero-

puertos de Culebra y Arecibo en los próximos meses.

“Tal y como anunciáramos la semana pasada con los aeropuertos de Isla Grande y Vieques, estos proyectos en Culebra y Arecibo son parte del “Airport Capital Improvement Program” de la FAA, y elegibles para una subvención (“grant”) del 100 por ciento de su costo por la agencia federal”, detalló Pizá Batiz.

En el caso del aeropuerto Benjamín Rivera Noriega de Culebra, el proyecto a subastarse el mes que viene consistiría en mejoras al pavimento, e incluye trabajos en la superficie de asfalto, pintura de marcado, drenajes, y cambios a la geometría de algunas intersecciones.

El proyecto incluiría actualizar todos los sistemas de ayuda de navegación visual; alumbrado del campo aéreo, rótulos de señalización, manga de viento (“windsock”), el faro (“beacon”), y una nueva bóveda en concreto para los reguladores de corriente con generador de emergencia y tanque de combustible adicional para mayor resiliencia.

Para el Aeropuerto Antonio “Nery” Juarbe de Arecibo, los trabajos a subastarse el mes que viene consistirían en la reconstrucción de todos los sistemas de ayuda de navegación visual; alumbrado del campo aéreo, rótulos de señalización, manga de viento (“windsock”), el faro (“beacon”), y una nueva

bóveda en concreto para los reguladores de corriente con generador de emergencia y tanque de combustible adicional para mayor resiliencia.

“A pesar de los grandes retos que enfrentamos por el COVID-19, la APPR sigue adelante con múltiples proyectos de mejoras capitales convencidos de que, aunque tomará algún tiempo, la industria de la aviación se levantará y será una más fuerte y resiliente”, concluyó Pizá Batiz.

Familia otorgara $1.4 millones de subvencion especial a participantes categoria C del TANF Por THE STAR

E

l secretario interino del Departamento de la Familia (DF), doctor Eddie García Fuentes, informó el lunes que cada familia participante de la categoría C (Children) del programa de Asistencia Temporera a Familias necesitadas (TANF por sus siglas en inglés) recibirán además de su subvención mensual un pago temporero a 4,214 familias, de los cuales 7,090 son menores participantes del programa.

“Esta subvención temporera se une al aumento en beneficios otorgado en el Programa TANF el pasado mes de abril. La categoría C del TANF asiste a menores con ausencia de un padre o incapacidad de los padres”, dijo García Fuentes en declaraciones escritas.

Durante un periodo de seis meses comenzando este próximo martes 27 de mayo, 11,511 participantes de la Categoría C del TANF recibirán una subvención adicional de $128 mensuales por la emergencia de salud provocada por el COVID-19.

Por su parte, la gobernadora a Wanda Vázquez

Garced indicó que “hace 12 años que no se ajustaban los beneficios a estas familias, quienes representan las mas necesitadas de los programas que administra la ADSEF y cuyos niveles de ingresos son los más bajos.

Continuamos trabajando incansablemente para proveer toda la ayuda disponible durante esta emergencia que de alguna manera u otra ha trastocado a todas las familias”.

La emisión especial se deposita el martes 27 de mayo y subsiguientemente se reciben los beneficios ordinarios de cada mes con el aumento y la subvención adicional el primer día del mes. Por lo que el lunes 1ro de junio recibirán el siguiente pago especial, junto con su beneficio mensual.

Anteriormente en la Categoría C (Children) el beneficio máximo mensual para un núcleo familiar de uno ascendía a 83 dólares, tras el ajuste anunciado el pasado mes de abril subió a 128 dólares de beneficio mensual máximo por participante en el núcleo familiar. Este mes comienzan a recibir 128 dólares adicionales por encima de su beneficio mensual.

“Asistir a las familias que tienen retos extraordinarios de recursos apoyándoles en la crianza de los menores y a cubrir sus necesidades les permite enfocarse en su salud y superación,” manifestó por su parte el sub administrador interino de la ADSEF, Alberto Fradera.

Los nuevos niveles de beneficios fueron aprobados por el gobierno federal, tras obtener una autorización en el Plan Estatal del programa Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) que administra la Administración de Desarrollo Socioeconómico de la Familia.

El programa TANF realiza desembolsos anuales que sobrepasan los $39 millones a las mas de 40 mil familias participantes elegibles en diversas categorías.

Por su bajo nivel de ingresos, estos participantes también son elegibles al Programa de Asistencia Nutricional (PAN).

Los participantes del TANF no tienen que realizar ninguna gestión para recibir el aumento en beneficios, ya que este se reflejará en su Tarjeta Unica.

20

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Amy Schumer misses stand-up. (‘I should have said my dad, but that’s not the truth.’)

By JASON ZINOMAN

I

t didn’t take long for Amy Schumer to shut down her old life.

“The first day I heard the term Wuhan market, that was it,” she said in a recent interview. “I was one of those people who was like: Pack your bags.”

Before long, she and her family had left New York and moved to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where her husband, chef Chris Fischer, is from. Her stand-up has obviously ceased, and a Hulu show has been put on pause. But she has been active, adjusting to the new limitations. “Amy Schumer Learns to Cook,” a weekly cooking show with her and her husband on the Food Network, premiered last week, and in July, her documentary about being pregnant as she prepared to make a comedy special will run on HBO Max. While her nearly 1-year-old son napped, she talked over Zoom about life under lockdown. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: How are you holding up?

A: If 10 is totally fine, I’m a 7. I’m worried about my dad, who is in assisted living where 15 people have died.

My mom is alone. It’s upsetting. And my friends who are nurses, a lot of them had it. But my day-to-day is nice. It’s nice to have a baby, because it gives you a routine, and he doesn’t know what’s going on.

Q: Your son Gene’s middle name was Attell, in honor of comic Dave Attell.

But you recently changed it. Why? A: I was proud of that name. Then a month in, I’m looking on the computer at it and I started freaking out. Gene Attell. We named our baby Genital. A month later, I’m like: We got to change it.

You can’t name your son Genital. I didn’t want to “boy name Sue” him. So now it’s Gene David.

Q: What do you miss most from the pre-lockdown world?

A: Stand-up. I should have said my dad, but that’s not the truth.

Q: Are you still writing jokes?

A: Yes, but I can’t work out my bits.

Q: Let’s do it. What’s a joke premise

Amy schumer as seen through facetime. Her day-to-day lockdown existence is fine, but she worries about friends and family. you have come up with recently?

A: These celebrities doing videos saying, “Stay at home,” and behind them is a moat and a diving board. There’s a woman going, “That’s why we all need to shelter-in-palace.”

Q: Celebrity can be isolating. Does being famous prepare you for social distancing?

A: It’s dangerous to compare, because, whatever, but it is true. I don’t know if you’re watching “The Last Dance.” I’m really enjoying it. I hadn’t thought of the politics of the salaries and how the star can call all the shots. But also seeing Michael Jordan in and out of the hotel, in and out of the car. Very isolating life. You can’t trust people. It feels like everyone feels that way now.

Q: That scene in the hotel alone at the height of his fame, Jordan looks sad.

A: You’re like: I don’t know why I am feeling bad about this billionaire in a Four Seasons, but I am.

Q: What else have you been watching during quarantine?

A: I have been going to the live Instagrams of Questlove, D-Nice and Talib Kweli at night. Literally, I will put on a bra on so I can dance alone in my room and let myself feel present and feel good.

Talib Kweli is playing the best hip-hop of

the ’90s. And I watched “Normal People,” a beautiful show. There’s so much sex. I have a long game with Seinfeld. I told him to not read anything about it and just watch it. I’m just sitting waiting for it to pay off for a week and it hasn’t. I’m like, what if he’s just watching it with his family? It has so much sex.

Q: Did you watch Louis C.K.’s new special?

A: Yes. I laughed at a lot of it. But it’s hard to not think of what he done, what he has and hasn’t learned, but I definitely laughed.

Q: Woody Allen also released a book. Is the pandemic good for the problematic?

A: It does seem like a safe time for the #MeToo guys. They are coming out of their foxholes. I don’t want to be a person who eases anyone’s way.

Q: I saw a stand-up comic tweet “Imagine getting offended by jokes after” all this. Do you think people will be offended by jokes less after the pandemic?

A: No. It doesn’t work that way. People will always get offended, and no, this is not this great equalizer. They’ll get offended just as much, maybe more.

Q: Does being a parent change how you approach fear?

A: It’s all about that. For me, it’s all

about his safety, his comfort. It used to be (my husband) Chris. Now it goes Gene, then me, then Chris. I’ll be running out of the burning house with Gene and be like: “Is Chris and the dog here?”

Q: When live comedy returns, will it look different?

A: I think it will come back and be fine. But it will take while. Are we going to open it up and people are going to wear bandannas over their mouths so you can’t even hear a laugh? You need masks with good acoustics.

Q: There’s a debate now about how fast we should open up.

A: I don’t want to be back on a set until I’m sure everything is safe. I’m not going to go to the Comedy Cellar for a year at least. It’s the biggest risk. If I didn’t have a baby, I might be a little more chill.

You care if you die less if you don’t. But now, I’m like, I better stay alive, I guess.

Q: If someone sneezes while you’re performing at a club, what’s your reaction?

A: I’ll probably stop talking onstage and just leave. Actually, no, I’ll throw the mic at the person who sneezed and run out the room scream-crying.

Q: Do you see clubs closing and careers ending from this?

A: What are you going to do if you’re making your living on the road?

There are so many different outlets that the strong will survive. They’ll pivot and evolve. Some comics are finding their footing in this space. Cole Escola, Megan Stalter — there are these interesting comics that maybe wouldn’t be seen by the audiences they are now.

Q: One way you are pivoting is doing a cooking show with your husband from your house. Why? A: A month ago, the Food Network reached out and said, “Would you want to make a cooking show with your husband?” We were like, “Yeah, that will keep us busy.” We didn’t even think about it. We left New York and started filming the next day.

Q: Isn’t the point of marrying a chef that you don’t have to learn how to cook?

Continues on page 21

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

21

Pixar short film ‘Out’ features studio’s first gay main character

By JOHNNY DIAZ

T

he man nervously practices in front of his dog how he is going to tell his parents he is gay.

“Just look them in the eyes and say, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m — this is my boyfriend, Manuel,’ ” Greg says, holding a framed photo of himself with his boyfriend Manuel.

That’s a scene from “Out,’’ the new short film from Pixar Animation Studios that introduces the studio’s first gay main character. The film debuted Friday on Disney Plus, the new streaming platform dedicated to movies and shows from Disney, Pixar, the “Star Wars” franchise, National Geographic and Marvel.

“Out,” a nine-minute animated film, is one of seven from Pixar’s SparkShorts program, which seeks “to discover new storytellers, explore new storytelling techniques and experiment with new production workflows,” Jim Morris, president of Pixar, said on the studio’s website.

“These films are unlike anything we’ve ever done at Pixar, providing an opportunity to unlock the potential of individual artists and their inventive filmmaking approaches on a smaller scale than our normal fare,” he said.

“Out” introduces viewers to Greg as he gets ready to move to an unnamed city with Manuel.

“On an average day, Greg’s life is filled with family, love and a rambunctious little dog — but despite all

of this, Greg has a secret,’’ reads the film’s description.

The secret? Greg is not out to his parents.

When his parents surprise him on moving day, he gets some help from his dog, Jim. In a magical turn of events worthy of “The Shaggy Dog” (1959), Greg and Jim temporarily switch bodies. In doing so, Greg learns the importance of being true to himself.

GLAAD, the LGBT advocacy organization, applauded the film’s gay narrative.

“Over the past few years, LGBTQ characters and stories have become common in the kids and family entertainment space with little controversy, but with large celebration from LGBTQ families with children who have longed to see themselves represented,” Jeremy Blacklow, director of entertainment media at GLAAD, said Sunday. “By centering on a young gay man, ‘Out’ just raised the bar for inclusion in kids and family programming.”

Kimberly A. Taylor, an associate professor of marketing and logistics at Florida International University in Miami, said Disney and Pixar recognize that “representation matters” on the big and small screens.

“To see oneself, one’s community, onscreen helps one to feel valued and validated and gives an expanded sense of what’s possible,’’ she said Sunday. “And on Disney-Pixar’s part,

Greg, the film’s lead character, has a secret he’s keeping from his parents, but with help from his dog, he learns he’s got nothing to hide. it’s also just good business. They obviously recognize that their audience, or potential audience, includes the LGBTQ community, just as it includes people of all genders, races, ethnicities, religions and so on.”

Disney and Pixar have made strides in diversity and inclusiveness in some of their biggest franchises over the years.

In March, actor Lena Waithe voiced Officer Spector, a secondary character who is referenced as a lesbian, in the animated film “Onward.”

As a result, the movie was banned in some Middle Eastern countries.

In last year’s “Toy Story 4,” viewers saw two mothers dropping off and picking up their daughter from a day care center in the background.

Donald Glover, who played Lando Calrissian in the “Star Wars” franchise movie “Solo,” said in an interview with HuffPost that his resistance leader character was pansexual, although that did not figure into the plot. In the 2019 Marvel movie “Avengers: Endgame,” a gay character made a brief appearance.

And in the 2017 live-action remake of “Beauty and the Beast,’’ LeFou, Gaston’s sidekick played by Josh Gad, was presented as gay.

In December, a brief kiss between two female characters was removed from screenings of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” in Singapore.

Disney removed the kiss to preserve the film’s PG-13 rating in that country, according to reports.

Amy Schumer misses stand-up. (‘I should have said my dad, but that’s not the truth.’)

From page 20 A: Exactly. I actually think it’s shifting our dynamic a little. He’s always been, “She’s the breadwinner, but I can keep the house going.” He keeps us nourished, but now I’m like: “I can chop those. Are you going to make the wings or me?” I think he’s a little shook up.

Q: One thing you see from the

show is, he’s a tough laugh.

A: Not just laugh. He’s a tough smile. But when you get him laughing, it feels really good.

Q: Does the pandemic bring people together or reveal our divisions?

A: Both. The divide is clearer. I used to have this urge to bridge. But it’s so out of control and impossible. Someone who thinks we should be allowed to leave our houses and do whatever

we want is, I guess, a Trump person. I’ve tried to understand what the thinking is, but I don’t have the capability of changing anyone’s mind. I wish them the best, and they don’t have to worry about me trying to have a conversation.

Q: Is there anything good that comes out of this pandemic?

A: No one’s going “Worth it!”

More people dead than Vietnam. Worth it! But there are totally beautiful parts to

this. Every day I text with my girlfriends from back home. We just stop and share memories. And we don’t really talk about COVID or what’s going on.

We just want to talk about who gave the most unnecessary blowjob and when we tried our first cigarette, and who was the worst drunk. Keeping it light. Just old memories. Just giving time to our memories. I’m just enjoying thinking about different times.

22

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

A new viral outbreak is killing rabbits

By JAMES GORMAN

T

here’s another deadly virus outbreak in the U.S., but this one is killing thousands of wild rabbits. It started in New Mexico in March and has since spread to Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, California and Mexico. It poses a fatal threat to pets as well as wild animals.

The illness is caused by Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Virus type 2 and does not affect humans or other animals, only rabbits, hares and perhaps pikas, a rabbit-like animal, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is not a coronavirus.

This is the first outbreak of the virus in wild rabbits in North America, but there have been other, smaller outbreaks among domestic rabbits in Ohio, Washington and New York, and in feral rabbits in Canada — pets

that have escaped or been released and continue to breed. The pet and feral animals are descendants of European rabbits, not native to North America.

Ralph Zimmerman, the state veterinarian in New Mexico, where the new outbreak started, said its origin is unknown. But, he added, imported domestic rabbits are one possibility; the disease was first identified in France in 2010 and spread throughout Europe and later Australia, where it swept the continent in about a year and a half. An outbreak at a New York veterinary clinic in March of this year killed 11 pet rabbits.

“We hear rumors of underground rabbit transport, and there are folks that do import rabbits from Europe,” Zimmerman said. “So our concern is that somebody brought them in, they were carrying the virus during trans-

An eastern cottontail rabbit in Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas.

port. If one of them died, they pitched it out and boom, we infect the wild rabbits and away we go.”

Not much can be done about wild populations of rabbits, Zimmerman said. Many die, and some survivors that are resistant to the virus repopulate the area. How much of the wild population dies will determine the effect of the disease on predators that rely on rabbits.

The virus is a variant of the original RHDV, which emerged in China in 1984 and spread through Asia, Europe and North and South America.

When it escaped in Australia, scientists there were studying it for possible use in controlling rabbit populations. It has been killing rabbits in Australia ever since, although RHDV type 2, the new virus, took over and became the dominant strain.

It is both highly infectious, and

extraordinarily sturdy. According to the federal National Wildlife Health Center, it can survive several months in dry conditions, lives through freezing and can be spread by rabbits, their pelts or their meat, or anything that has come in contact with them, including insects. Often, rabbits simply drop dead.

The disease poses a serious danger to domestic rabbits. Last year the agriculture department estimated that nearly 3 million U.S. households had about 6.7 million pet rabbits. There is a vaccine for the disease approved in Europe, and states, in concert with the agriculture department, can approve its use, which has happened in New Mexico, Zimmerman said.

Doses of the vaccine will be delivered to veterinarians, whom pet owners should contact if they want to vaccinate their pets. The agriculture department has information for rabbit owners about the disease on its website, as does the House Rabbit Society, a rabbit rescue and education organization.

But vaccine approval could come too late for a rabbit owners, because there must be a confirmed rabbit death in order for a veterinarian to begin applying for emergency approval in any given state, said Anne Martin, executive director of the House Rabbit Society.

And like any virus, this one has an incubation period; by the time rabbits begin to die, the virus is already spreading, and the vaccine still must then be imported once the approval paperwork is done.

To be safe, rabbits, like people, need to be isolated. There are also other precautions to take, Martin said, because the virus can survive for so long, but “the biggest risk to rabbits is if they are outside or they have any outdoor playtime.”

The best approach if the outbreak has reached your region of the country is to keep your pet rabbits inside, alone and craving sunshine, just like you.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

23

To fight COVID-19, don’t neglect immunity and inflammation

By JANE E. BRODY

W

hile most people focus, as they should, on social distancing, face coverings, hand washing and even self isolation to protect against the deadly coronavirus now ravaging the country, too few are paying serious attention to two other factors critically important to the risk of developing a COVID-19 infection and its potential severity.

Those factors are immunity, which should be boosted, and inflammation, which should be suppressed. I’ve touched on both in past columns, but now that months of pandemic-related restrictions have impacted the lives of millions, and after seeing who is most likely to become infected and die, immunity and inflammation warrant further discussion and public attention.

One fact is indisputable: Older people are especially vulnerable to this disease and its potentially fatal consequences. But “older” doesn’t necessarily mean “old.” While people older than 80 are 184 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those in their 20s, Dr. Nir Barzilai, scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research, points out that vulnerability increases starting around age 55.

Immune defenses decline with age.

That is a fundamental fact of biology. For example, with advancing age, natural killer cells, a major immunological weapon, become less effective at destroying virusinfected cells. But it doesn’t mean nothing can be done to slow or sometimes even reverse immunological decline, said Barzilai, who directs the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

At the same time, inflammation in tissues throughout the body increases with age, a fact that helps the coronavirus get into the body, bind to molecules in the nose and lungs, and wreak havoc, Janet Lord, director of the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing at the University of Birmingham in England, explained in a webinar this month.

Fat tissue, for example, increases inflammation and renders overweight people more vulnerable to a COVID infection.

Here, too, there are established ways to diminish inflammation and thereby en-

hance resistance to this deadly disease.

The basic weapons, diet and exercise, are available to far more people than currently avail themselves of their benefits. Lifestyle can have a major impact on a person’s immune system, for better or worse, Lord said.

I spoke recently to a friend who “escaped” New York City in early March to avoid COVID-19. But while he reduced his risk of infection by limiting contact with other people, he has gained weight, lost muscle mass and, in becoming nearly sedentary, is also now more likely to become seriously ill if he should contract the virus.

“Skeletal muscle helps the immune system,” Lord said.

The contractions of skeletal muscles produce small proteins called myokines that, by dampening inflammation, have big health benefits. Myokines ferret out infections and keep inflammation from getting out of hand, she said. Also, exercising skeletal muscle helps diminish body fat and increases the potency of natural killer cells no matter what your age. An 85-yearold who increases muscle mass is better able to recover from COVID, she said.

The more extensive or vigorous the exercise, the less inflammation, Lord said.

She noted that those who do fewer than 3,000 steps a day have the highest level of inflammation, whereas those who do 10,000 or more steps daily have the least inflammation. But social isolation doesn’t

have to make you a couch potato.

“You don’t need any special equipment,” she said, so the inability to go to a gym or even outside need not be an impediment to getting in those 10,000 steps.

She suggested exercises like heel raises, leg raises and sit-to-stand exercises. You could even use two of those cans of beans you stocked up on to strengthen arm muscles.

Or consider going up and down stairs, or even one step, which has the added benefit of strengthening heart function.

Exercise is especially important for people with chronic health conditions that increase their vulnerability to a serious COVID infection.

“No matter what your condition, exercise will improve your immunity,” Lord said.

Regular exercise can also improve your sleep, which can suppress inflammation and keep your immune system from having to work overtime. Aim for 7-8 hours of sleep a night. If virus-related anxieties keep you awake, try tai chi, meditation or progressive muscle relaxation (from feet to head) to reduce stress and calm your mind and body. Avoid eating a big meal late in the day or consuming caffeine after noon.

Perhaps eat a banana or drink a glass of warm milk about an hour before bedtime.

Which brings me to what for many is the biggest health challenge during the coronavirus crisis: consuming a varied, nutrient-rich diet and keeping calorie intake under control. It seems baking has

become a popular pastime for many sheltering at home, and the consequences — weight gain and overconsumption of sugar and refined flour — can increase susceptibility to the virus. Excess weight weakens the immune system, and abdominal fat in particular enhances damaging inflammation.

The good news, according to Dr. Leonard Calabrese, clinical immunologist at the Cleveland Clinic, is that even small amounts of weight loss can counter inflammation, a benefit aided by avoiding highly processed foods and eating more fresh fruits and vegetables that are relatively low in calories and high in protective nutrients.

Especially helpful are foods rich in vitamin C — all manner of citrus (oranges, grapefruit, clementines, etc.), red bell pepper, spinach, papaya and broccoli — and zinc, including shellfish (oysters are a powerhouse of zinc), seeds, dairy products, red meat, beans, lentils and nuts.

For those who drink alcohol, these stressful times can tempt overconsumption. More than the recommended two drinks a day for men and one for women can reduce immunity-boosting nutrients in the body and impair the ability of white blood cells to fight off microbial invaders, Calabrese notes. For those who drink, a 5-ounce serving of red wine a day is widely considered a beneficial component of an anti-inflammatory Mediterranean-style diet.

Reports linking a deficiency of vitamin D to an increased risk of developing a severe COVID-19 infection have prompted some people to take measures that may ultimately undermine their health, like basking unprotected in the sun, which can lead to skin cancer, and taking excessive amounts of a vitamin D supplement, which can cause distressing gastrointestinal symptoms.

Healthy blood levels of vitamin D can, though, help keep the body’s immune system strong and possibly help prevent it from raging out of control, causing the cytokine storm that can severely damage the lungs and other tissues and has resulted in many COVID-19 deaths. But for those with already healthy levels of vitamin D, there’s no established immune benefit from taking more than 2,000 IU of vitamin D-3 a day.

24

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

There’s something special about the sun: It’s a bit boring

By ADAM MANN

T

he sun, like all stars, is a blazing ball of fusion-powered plasma. From its surface emerge magnetic field lines that can cause dark patches known as sunspots. Turn up the activity of these magnetic whorls, and you get more solar storms flinging deadly charged particles and radiation throughout our solar system. If enough of these punishing waves hit a rocky planet, that planet might end up microwaved into a dreary condition where nothing could live.

So how is it that we’re alive? A study in the journal Science suggests that our sun is rather tame compared with its stellar siblings, and that hundreds of other sun-like stars in our galaxy have on average five times more magnetic activity than our parent star.

In other words, the sun is a bit humdrum, which might be good for life on Earth.

Astronomers have been tracking the appearance of sunspots since the time of Galileo, providing a proxy for solar activity stretching back four centuries. Some previous studies also implied that the sun was quieter than other similar stars. But competing evidence has also found the sun’s activity level is norThe sun seems a little less active than hundreds of mal for stars of its size.

“This triggered the question: ‘Is the sun a real sun-like similar stars in our galaxy, which could play a role star?’” said Timo Reinhold, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck in why life exists in our solar system.

Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, and co-author of the paper. itored approximately 150,000 stars in the Milky Way for four Reinhold and colleagues looked at data collected by NA- years to find exoplanets, and was capable of observing brightSA’s retired Kepler space telescope, which continuously mon- ness variations from activity such as the appearance and disap-

JOB OPPORTUNITIES PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR

PRODUCTION EQUIPMENT MANAGER

5+ year experience supervising manufacturing production lines. Mechanical ability a plus, bilingual a MUST! 40k a year with benefits and great bonuses based on productivity. Beautiful air conditioned food facility in Milford PA.

Must have experience in flow wrappers, bagging equipment, and cartoners. Electrical experience a PLUS! Bi-lingual a MUST! 45k a year with benefits. Beautiful air conditioned food facility in Milford PA.

Send resume to kenright@econo-pak.com if interested.

Send resume to kenright@econo-pak.com if intetested.

PLANT MANAGER

ELECTROMECHANICAL TECHNICIAN

Food grade facility responsible for 3 shifts,production 5 days a week managing QA, QC in a productional warehouse. SQF quality background a PLUS. 75k base, health insurance, generous bonus plan.

Responsible for performing highly diversified duties to install, troubleshoot repair and maintain production and facility equipment according to safety, predictive and productive maintenance systems and processes to support the achievement of the site’s business goals and objectives. Beautiful air conditioned food facility in Milford PA. Send resume to kenright@econo-pak.com if interested.

If interested send resume to kenright@econo-pak.com

pearance of starspots.

The researchers selected stars with masses, temperatures, ages, chemical compositions and rotation periods comparable to our sun’s. They eventually found 369 stars for comparison, the largest such sample to date.

Stars like the sun go through regular cycles during which spots cross their surfaces with greater or less frequency. During times of peak magnetic activity, when spots pop out all over the surface, a star will dim. Our sun’s cycle lasts about 11 Earth years.

For the sun, this dimming is negligible. Data from the past 140 years indicates that its brightness changes by less than a tenth of a percent over the course of its cycle. But for the stars studied

by Kepler, the variability could be up to 12 times that amount.

The team has come up with two rather different potential explanations for what this means.

The first is that the sun is in a period of unusual torpor, and will one day wake up and become more like its kin. Evidence for this idea comes from significant swings in the sun’s activity levels during recorded history. Between 1645 and 1715, an era known as the Maunder Minimum, astronomers observed few to no sunspots. More than a century later, in 1859, the sun released one of the largest electromagnetic storms ever recorded, the Carrington Event, which knocked out telegraph lines and generated auroras as far south as the Caribbean.

But Natalie Krivova, a co-author and an astrophysicist at Max Planck, said that data from ice cores, which contain chemical indicators of solar activity stretching back 9,000 years, don’t suggest that the sun was any more raucous in the geologically recent past. Then again, nine millenniums is a blip compared with the sun’s 4 billion-year life span.

The second idea, Krivova said, is that the magnetic dynamo inside the sun, which powers its colossal magnetic field, is reaching the end of its high-powered stage, and is currently transitioning into a period of reduced activity. Stars older than the sun show marked decreases in magnetic activity, and the sun is just about getting to the age when this shift should occur.

Some stellar scientists believe that the sun’s magnetic dynamo might be “reaching its end state, or almost its death,” said Ricky Egeland, a solar physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

The 369 sun-like stars observed by Kepler might simply be in an earlier stage of evolution than the sun, these scientists say. Or perhaps something particular about the sun is causing an early transition. Reinhold’s team doesn’t favor one explanation over the other.

In either case, a quiet sun has benefited our species. When the sun flares up, its energetic emissions do harm to astronauts and satellites in orbit, and especially powerful outbursts can affect power grids down on the ground. Radiation from such events is not particularly conducive to the existence of living organisms.

Models indicate that when the sun was younger, perhaps half a billion or 1 billion years old, it had greater magnetic activity than today, Egeland said.

“I always wonder what effect this variability had on the development of life,” he said. “It may be no coincidence that we live around a very inactive star.”

The San Juan Daily Star LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO

DE PUERTO RICO TRlBU-

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

(787) 723-2455; abogada de extravió un pagaré hipotecario

parte demandante, con copia suscrito por los demandan-

de la contestación a la deman- tes, a favor de Banco Popular da. Si usted deja de presentar de Puerto Rico o a su orden,

NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA su alegación responsiva dentro por la suma de $39,500.00,

SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA del referido término, el tribunal según consta de la escritura BAJA.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Parte Demandante vs.

RAQUEL B. SANTANA BRUNO Parte Demandada

CIVIL NUM.: VA2018CV00101.

SALA: 201. SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO PROCEDIMIENTO

ORDINARIO.

ZAMIENTO

POR

EMPLA-

EDICTO

EMITIDO POR EL TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA DE

PUERTO RICO, SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA BAJA

podrá dictar sentencia en rebel- número146, otorgada en Madía en su contra y conceder el yagüez, Puerto Rico, el día 23

remedio solicitado en la deman- de diciembre de 1994, ante el

da, o cualquier otro, si el tribu- notario Héctor A. Rodríguez, nal, en el ejercicio de su sana y grava la propiedad que se

discreción, lo entiende proce- describe a continuación: RÚSdente. Expedido en Vega Baja, TICA: Parcela marcada con el Puerto Rico, a 13 de mayo de número doscientos veinticuatro 2020. LCDA. LAURA l. S ANTA en el plano de parcelación de la

SANCHEZ, Secretarla Regio- Comunidad Rural San Romualnal. Maritza Rosario Rosario, do del barrio Guanajibo del térSECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

mino municipal de Hormiguero,

Puerto Rico, con una cabida su-

LEGAL NOTICE

perficial de punto cero ocho dos

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO cinco (.0825) cuerdas, equivaDE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- lente a trescientos veinticuatro

DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA A: RAQUEL B. SANTANA NAL SALA SUPERIOR DE MAYABRUNO, parte demandada GUEZ. en el caso de: Banco FIRSTBANK Popular de Puerto PUERTO RICO Rico vs, Raquel B. Parte Demandante Vs. Santana Bruno, Civil BANCO POPULAR DE Núm.: VA2018CV00101 PUERTO RICO, JOHN (201) sobre Cobro de DOE y RICHARD ROE Dinero (Procedimiento como posibles tenedores Ordinario). desconocidos Se le notifica a usted: RAQUEL B. SANTANA BRUNO, que en la Demanda que originó este caso se alega que usted le

adeuda a la parte demandante,

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO, las siguientes cantidades: a. $12,706.43 de principal e intereses devengados

al tipo pactado hasta el 17 de

agosto de 2018, más los intereses que se devenguen a partir de la fecha de radicación de la Demanda al tipo legal hasta

el total y completo pago de la

obligación, y una suma razonable para las costas,_gastos y honorarios de abogado , por

concepto de las sumas desembolsadas bajo una tarjeta de

crédito AMEX cuyos últimos 4

dígitos son 3793. Se le emplaza y requiere que presente al

tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los treinta (30)

días siguientes a la públicación de este edicto, a través del

Sistema Unificado de Adminis-

tración y Manejo de I Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio,

en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la

secretaría del tribunal. Deberá

notificar a a licenciada: María

S. Jiménez Meléndez al PO Box 9023632, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00902-3632; teléfono :

@

punto

veintinueve (324.29) PARTE DEMANDADA metros cuadrados. En lindes CIVIL NÚM. CA2020CV00051. por el NORTE, con la calle; por SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE

el SUR, con la parcela número PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO POR doscientos veintiuno 9221 ); por LA VÍA JUDICIAL. EDICTO. el ESTE, con la parcela número ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉdoscientos veintitrés (223); y RICA EL PRESIDENTE DE por el OESTE, con la calle de LOS E.E.U.U. EL ESTADO LIla comunidad. Inscrita al folio BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO dios ciento noventa y tres (293) RICO. del tomo ciento veintiocho (128) de Hormigueros, finca número

Parte Demandada cuatro mil cuatrocientos veinCIVIL NUM. MZ2020CV00296. tinueve (4,429) del Registro SOBRE: CANCELACION DE de la Propiedad de Mayagüez.

PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. EM- SE LES APERCIBE que, de PLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. no hacer sus alegaciones resEstados Unidos DE AMERICA ponsivas a la demanda dentro EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS del término aquí dispuesto, se EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE les anotará la rebeldía y se ASOCIADO DE PUERTO dictará Sentencia, concediénRICO. SS.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE como posibles tenedores desconocidos

dose el remedio solicitado en

la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Mayagüez,

POR LA PRESENTE se les Puerto Rico, a día 13 de mayo

emplaza y requiere para que de 2020. Lic. Norma G. Sanconteste la demanda dentro de tana lrizarry, SECRETARIA(O)

los treinta (30) días siguientes REGIONAL II. GUILLERMINA a la publicación de este Edic- TORRES PAGAN, SECRETAto. Usted deberá radicar su RIA REGIONAL AUXILIAR. alegación responsiva a través

del Sistema Unificado de Ma-

LEGAL NOTICE

nejo y Administración de Ca- ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO sos (SUMAC), al cual puede DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-

acceder utilizando la siguiente NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA dirección electrónica: http:// SALA SUPERIOR DE CAROunired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, LINA. salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de

su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la

parte demandante, Leda. Marjaliisa Colón Villanueva, al PO

BOX 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Teléfono:

787-843-4168.

En

dicha demanda se tramita un

procedimiento de cancelación

de pagare extraviado. Se alega en dicho procedimiento que se

staredictos1@outlook.com

RESIDENTE CT CORPORATION SYSTEM; FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION (FDIC) COMO SÍNDICO DE DORAL BANK; THE MORTGAGE LOAN CO. INC.; MIGUEL ÁNGEL BURGOS RIVERA, DENNISSE RAMOS MARTÍNEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS, FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

PARTE DEMANDANTE VS.

DORAL FINANCIAL CORPORATION H/N/C H.F. MORTGAGE BANKERS, POR CONDUCTO DE SU AGENTE RESIDENTE; DORAL MORTGAGE CORPORATION T/C/C DORAL MORTGAGE, LLC., POR CONDUCTO DE SU AGENTE

A: THE MORTGAGE LOAN CO. INC a sus últimas direcciones conocidas: COUNTRY CLUB 915, AVE ROBERTO SANCHEZ VILELLA (AVE. CAMPO RICO), SAN JUAN, PR 00924 y URB RIO PIEDRAS HTS, 220 CALLE RUBICON, SAN JUAN, PR 00926-3218.

MIGUEL ÁNGEL BURGOS RIVERA, DENNISSE RAMOS MARTÍNEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS a su última dirección conocida: URB VILLAS DEL SOL, 509 CALLE GIJON (PARCELA E9) CAROLINA, PR 009855112.

FULANO y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ

25 la notario Francisca Díaz López Guaynabo,

00970-3922,

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto)

AMBOS

Demandado(a)

suma de $153,375.00 a favor correo electrónico: oficinabel- EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus- Civil: Núm. GB2019CV00751. de Doral Financial Corporation maalonso@gmail.com, dentro cribe le notifica a usted que SALA 201. Sobre: INCUMh/n/c H.F. Mortgage Bankers., del término de treinta (30) días el 23 de abril de 2020, este PLIMIENTO DE CONTRATO, o a su orden, con intereses al de la publicación de este edicto, Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, COBRO DE DINERO. NOTIFI7% anual y vencedero el 1ro excluyéndose el día de la publi- Sentencia Parcial o Resolución CACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR de enero de 2031, sobre la si- cación, se le anotará la rebeldía en este caso, que ha sido debi- EDICTO. guiente propiedad: URBANA: y se le dictará Sentencia en su damente registrada y archivada Parcela E-9 de la Urbanización contra, concediendo el reme- en autos donde podrá usted Villas del Sol, sita en el Barrio dio solicitado sin más citarle ni enterarse detalladamente de Martin González del Munici- oírle. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma los términos de la misma. Esta pio de Carolina, Puerto Rico, y el sello del Tribunal, hoy 14 notificación se publicará una

mayo de 2020, en sola vez en un periódico de cuadrados. Carolina, Puerto Rico. LCDA. circulación general en la Isla equivalentes a 0.0621 cuerdas, MARILYN APONTE RODRI- de Puerto Rico, dentro de los colindando por el NORTE, en GUEZ, SECRETARIA REGIO- 10 días siguientes a su notificacon una cabida superficial de de 244.121

metros

A: LUIS DIAZ NEVAREZ, LUZ RODRIGUEZ RIVERA Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) 9.870 metros con la parcela NAL. DENISSE TORRES RUIZ, ción. Y, siendo o representando EL SECRETARIO(A) que sususted una parte en el procediD-9; por el SUR, en 9.119 me- SECRETARIA AUXILIAR. cribe le notifica a usted que miento sujeta a los términos tros, con la Calle Gijón; por el el 27 de marzo de 2020, este LEGAL NOTICE de la Sentencia, Sentencia ESTE, en 25.00 metros con la Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, parcela E-8; y por el OESTE, Estado Libre Asociado de Puer- Parcial o Resolución, de la cual Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en 24.249 metros con la calle to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL puede establecerse recurso de en este caso, que ha sido debiMérida. Enclava una casa que DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Pri- revisión o apelación dentro del damente registrada y archivada mide 22’-9” de ancho por 38’- mera Instancia Sala Superior término de 30 días contados a en autos donde podrá usted partir de la publicación por edic8” de largo y tiene en el primer de Guaynabo. enterarse detalladamente de to de esta notificación, dirijo a nivel, portal, vestíbulo, baño de HACIENDA DEL MAR los términos de la misma. Esta usted esta notificación que se visita, sala-comedor, cocina, OWNERS notificación se publicará una considerará hecha en la fecha lavandería con despensa y esASSOCIATION, INC. sola vez en un periódico de de la publicación de este ediccalera que conduce al segundo Demandante v. circulación general en la Isla to. Copia de esta notificación ha piso, con un patio de servicio y WILFREDO VILLANUEVA de Puerto Rico, dentro de los sido archivada en los autos de área para estacionar dos autoMERCADO, SUCESION este caso, con fecha de 22 de 10 días siguientes a su notificamóviles, ambos, descubiertos, ción. Y, siendo o representando DE EUGENIA mayo de 2020. n Guaynabo , al frente de la casa. El segundo usted una parte en el procedinivel consta de dos dormitorios, GUILLERMINA SARDIÑAS Puerto Rico, el 22 de mayo de miento sujeta a los términos SARDIÑAS COMPUESTA 2020 . LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA tres closets, baño, dormitorios POR FULANO DE TAL SANCHEZ, SEC. REG. II f/DIA- de la Sentencia, Sentencia master, baño master, closet Parcial o Resolución, de la cual MAR GONZALEZ BARRETO, vestidor y escalera que conY SUTANA DE TAL puede establecerse recurso de Secretario(a) Auxiliar. duce al primer piso. Este solar COMO HEREDEROS revisión o apelación dentro del está afecto a una servidumbre DESCONOCIDOS término de 30 días contados a LEGAL NOTICE que discurre a lo largo de sus Demandado(a) partir de la publicación por ediccolindancias Norte y Oeste con Civil: Núm. GB2019CV00401. Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto de esta notificación, dirijo a un ancho de 150 metros a favor SALA 201. Sobre: COBRO DE to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL usted esta notificación que se de la Puerto Rico Telephone DINERO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Priconsiderará hecha en la fecha mera Instancia Sala Superior Company. La propiedad cons- SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. de la publicación de este edicde Guaynabo. ta inscrita al folio 115 del tomo A: SUCESION DE to. Copia de esta notificación ha 1377 de Carolina, Finca 52228.

FIRSTBANK EUGENIA GUILLERMINA sido archivada en los autos de Registro de la Propiedad de CaPUERTO RICO SARDIÑAS SARDIÑAS este caso, con fecha de 22 de rolina, Sección II. La escritura Demandante v. mayo de 2020. n Guaynabo, COMPUESTA POR de hipoteca consta inscrita al LUIS DIAZ NEVAREZ, LUZ Puerto Rico, el 22 de mayo de FULANO DE TAL Y folio 140 del tomo 1217 de CaRODRIGUEZ RIVERA Y 2020. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SUTANA DE TAL rolina, Finca 52228. Registro de LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE SANCHEZ, Secretario(a). f/ COMO HEREDEROS la Propiedad de Carolina, SecBIENES GANANCIALES MAIRENI TRINTA MALDONAción II. Inscripción primera. La DESCONOCIDOS DO, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

COMPUESTA POR parte demandada deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado

de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente

dirección electrónica: https:// unired.ramajudicial.pr,

salvo

que se represente por derecho

Queda usted notificado que en propio, en cuyo caso deberá este Tribunal se ha radicado presentar su alegación respondemanda sobre cancelación siva en la secretaría del Tribude pagaré extraviado por la nal. Se le advierte que, si no vía judicial. El 13 de diciembre contesta la demanda, radicando de 2000, Miguel Ángel Burgos el original de la contestación en Rivera y su esposa Dennisse este Tribunal y enviando copia

Ramos Martínez, constituye- de la contestación a la abogada ron una hipoteca en San Juan, de la Parte Demandante, Lcda.

Puerto Rico, conforme a la Es- Belma Alonso García, cuya critura núm. 60 autorizada por dirección es: PO Box 3922,

(787) 743-3346

PR

en garantía de un pagaré por la Teléfono y Fax: (787) 789-1826,

San Juan

Star

The

DAILY

MEJORES PRECIOS!!!

“Tarifas Fijas” en todas las publicaciones.

NOTIFICACIONES SUBASTAS EMPLAZAMIENTO MARCAS EXP. DOMINIO

$60 $195 p/p $95 $60 $85 p/p

(787) 743-3346 • staredictos1@outlook.com •

26

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

The cost of rushing back to sports: A star’s life

By KURT STREETER

N

obody made much of it when Joe Hall skated off the ice.

On March 29, 1919, his Montreal Canadiens were on the brink of losing Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final to the Seattle Metropolitans. Hall, 37, was one of hockey’s original enforcers, known for applying his wooden stick like a cudgel and delivering knockout blows. The Canadiens, behind 3-0 heading into the third period, needed his pounding determination.

But he went meekly to the bench and sat down.

The Seattle crowd roared for the Metropolitans. The Canadiens mounted a comeback and won, 4-3, in overtime. Hall was gone.

Reporters failed to draw a connection between his departure — and the gaunt pallor of players on both teams — and the Spanish flu, which had swept across the world the year before. By the time the 1919 Stanley Cup Final had gotten underway, la grippe had become an afterthought.

“People were exuberant, in need of something to celebrate,” said Kevin Ticen, a Seattle author who has written about the final. “There was also a lot of denial.”

Then the celebration turned somber.

Days after Montreal’s comeback, players on both sides grew sick. More than half of the Canadiens, and the owner of the team, were stricken by the flu. Hall was suffering worst of all.

The sports world, said his grandson Larry Hall, 79, should learn from history.

“What happened to my grandfather is relevant now in a way I never thought it would be,” he said. “The flu that hit the Stanley Cup came at the end of a series of pandemic waves. People relaxed, and then, unfortunately, it came again.”

Hours before a winner-take-all Game 6, hockey officials did something they had never done before or since.

They canceled the Stanley Cup Final midstream.

A More Deadly Second Wave In the United States, the first deadly outbreak of the Spanish flu came in Kansas, hitting a small town and its Army base in early 1918. From there, it is thought, soldiers spread the flu across the country and into the trenches of Europe and then far beyond,

Joe Hall was one of professional hockey’s early stars and among its most notorious. fueling one of the worst disasters in human history.

Over two years, the Spanish flu killed at least 50 million people, including 55,000 in Canada and 675,000 in the U.S. More than half of its victims died during the second wave, which lasted three months late in 1918. A Jack Dempsey fight was postponed. Many high schools and colleges shortened or shuttered their sports seasons. Michigan and Pittsburgh were named the college football national champions. Both played only five games.

Major League Baseball was the dominant sport of the time. Worried about viral transmission, it banned the spitball. In a recently published book, “War Fever,” history professors Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith said that several Boston Red Sox briefly fell ill during spring training near an Army base in Arkansas and that the team’s biggest star, Babe Ruth, was sickened by the virus in the season’s first full month.

Ruth recovered and led the Red Sox to a World Series title in 1918. But teeming crowds at Fenway Park may well have spread the pandemic and helped make Boston one of the worst U.S. centers of infection.

No sport, however, was affected quite like hockey.

Joe Hall was born in Britain and raised in rural Canada. He was one of professional hockey’s early stars and among its most notorious. A vagabond of sorts, Hall played for nine teams and on two Stanley Cup winners

before landing with the Canadiens in 1917 for one last stop. He was not big — only 5 feet, 9 inches tall and about 165 pounds.

Though away from games he was well-liked and known for his quiet dignity, on the ice he carried himself like a warrior.

On one occasion, he was said to have attacked two Toronto players at the same time and caused a riot. Then there was a tale about an in-game skirmish during which he inflicted such bloody mayhem that he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

“They called him Bad Joe in those days, or sometimes just The Bad Man,” Larry Hall said. “A tough guy who refused to back down.”

Hockey was different then, said Eric Zweig, a historian and author of “Fever Season,” a book about Hall and the Cup. Players were not as big and strong as they are now, but they were tough and durable.

Teams dressed only about 10 players. They did not wear masks or helmets and had little padding.

Their pay? Larry Hall, a health club owner who spoke on the phone from his home two hours north of Toronto, described a cherished item on a wall in his office: Joe Hall’s contract for the 1918-19 season. He earned $600, with a potential $100 bonus.

A Mounting Toll in Seattle Blow-by-blow accounts of what happened during the 1919 Stanley Cup come from archived newspapers and a slim number of history books. There is no known audio or film record.

But after all this time, Joe Hall’s family remembers.

“The genes pass on,” Larry Hall said, “and for us, so do the stories. They’re part of who we are.”

As the NHL began its regular-season games in late 1918, some called the coming hockey year the “Peace Season,” a nod to the fact that World War I had ended a month earlier.

But the Spanish flu kept coming in waves.

In Seattle, the death toll mounted that October, and the city clamped down. Wearing masks became mandatory, and spitting could result in arrest. Businesses, schools and churches were closed, and large gatherings were banned.

When the number of sick people de-

creased, the measures were loosened — which led to the virus’ deadly return.

By March, when Montreal arrived by train for the championship series, which would be played entirely in Seattle, the pandemic had retreated enough to become an afterthought.

The fated fight for the Cup is known not only for how it ended, but also for its intensity. Game 4 is considered by many to be one of the greatest in hockey history.

Seattle held a 2-1 series lead and needed just one more victory to take the Cup. But after two overtime periods, 80 minutes of play and not a single goal from either side, the contest was called a tie. Exhausted players collapsed to the ice. Some needed to be carried to the locker rooms.

“They may be playing for hockey championships for the next thousand years,” wrote a reporter on hand, “but they’ll never stage a greater struggle.”

Then came Game 5 and Hall’s wilting departure. His illness was barely mentioned in initial reports. Hall, one newspaper said, had a high fever caused by “overexertion.”

News stories about Hall’s condition reported his regressing each day as it became clear that he had been struck especially hard by the virus.

His fever rose to alarming levels — 102 degrees, 103, 104.

Because of the double-overtime tie and Montreal’s Game 5 win, the teams were slated to play once more to decide the championship. The Spanish flu spread through both teams, and the Canadiens did not have enough healthy players to keep going. After a proposal to bring in replacements was rejected, Montreal offered to forfeit. Seattle refused to claim the title that way. Finally, hockey officials called the series a draw, a result memorialized on the Stanley Cup. The year and team names were etched on the silver chalice. Below that was engraved: SERIES NOT COMPLETED. And Joe Hall?

His teammates recovered, but he remained hospitalized.

Fluid filled his lungs, and his fever stayed stubbornly high. His wife raced by train from Canada to be at his side, but she was too late.

A week after his last game, the great enforcer died.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

27

Tiger vs Phil (and Tom vs Peyton) turned rivalry into laughs

Peyton Manning reading the green with Tiger Woods, who had not played since finishing last at an event in February.

By BILL PENNINGTON

T

he charity golf match pitting Tiger Woods and Peyton Manning against Phil Mickelson and Tom Brady on Sunday figured to be good TV. It had big names, long-standing rivalries spanning two sports, an intriguing combination of talents and the prospect of the unforeseen.

To say it did not disappoint would be an understatement. Because, seriously, did anyone truly expect these developments?

Right from the start, Brady played so horrendously — in one 30-minute stretch

he put consecutive tee shots in the woods, a pond and on a cart path next to the out of bounds — that he was mocked by guest TV analyst Charles Barkley, whose golf swing is as bad as any ever captured on video. Brady looked more disgusted than he had after his final NFL pass last season, and that was a pick-6 in a playoff rout.

Twitter followers in the 44 states outside New England were jubilant and could not type their taunts of Brady fast enough.

A grinning Bill Belichick must have felt vindicated for giving up on an aging athlete clearly on the decline. Brooks Koepka, the

world’s third-ranked golfer, who was watching from his Florida home, posted to Twitter that he would donate $100,000 to coronavirus relief efforts if Brady parred a hole on the front nine.

Then, one hole after even Woods taunted Brady for finally hitting a fairway off the tee — except not on the hole they were playing — Brady hit a wedge shot from more than 100 yards in the seventh fairway that bounced on the green and rolled backward into the hole.

“Shut your mouth, Chuck,” Brady yelled in response to Barkley’s commentary, which in this exhibition was delivered directly into an earpiece Brady was wearing.

“Brooks owes me a little money,” Brady crowed.

Oh, yes, and then, with his back to the television cameras, Brady bent over to retrieve his golf ball from the seventh hole and split his pants for all to see.

Do you think that elicited a response on social media?

Brady’s dramatic shot also won the hole at a time when the Brady-Mickelson team was being trounced. And magically, Brady suddenly started to play better. The competition at the Medalist Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Fla., grew close and had juice with genuinely biting, but funny, banter between the participants.

And it went down to the final putt on the last hole with Woods and Manning winning, 1-up.

Moreover, with the help of Brady’s comeback, and the solid play and winsome personality of Manning, Sunday’s match provided more than four hours of entertaining live sports that will most likely be a major television ratings success.

The event was originally billed as a rematch of sorts, pitting Woods and Mickelson two years after they played a boring headto-head contest on Thanksgiving weekend in 2018, on a pay-per-view broadcast that was riddled with problems. Sunday’s reprise was saved by the NFL interlopers, which really might not have been a surprise since everyday golfers love to imagine how they would handle the pressure of playing with top golf pros on national TV. Hint: We would look like Brady before the seventh hole.

Yes, to be sure, Brady and Manning, two of the most accomplished athletes of

the past 25 years, are not average people plucked off the street. But as golfers they sure looked like it from time to time. And watching Woods and Mickelson try to work with that level of golf expertise to win a match was fascinating.

And here are two discoveries from watching that experience unfold: Woods is not warm and fuzzy, but his golf game and surgically rebuilt back are both in terrific shape. Woods rarely missed a shot of any kind and consistently hammered his driver, a sometime nemesis, accurately and with power. Woods’ swing was fluid, he walked with ease and he frequently bent and stretched without any apparent discomfort. His short game could be dazzling.

Mickelson thinks he is “Phil” Nye the Science Guy. Mickelson’s dissertations to Brady on how to stroke a 10-foot putt would go on for about two minutes with detailed explanations about how the shading of a green surface reflected the grass grain and would affect the rolling of a putt. It was great stuff for golf geeks, but by the end of the match it was as if Mickelson was trying out for a part on “The Big Bang Theory.”

The match was not always the finest promotion of social distancing. The golfers stood less than 6 feet apart from time to time. There were occasional fist bumps.

Once or twice, a golf ball was snatched from the green and flipped to a partner.

Those are no-nos and not hard to avoid.

Since the PGA Tour expects to resume next month, golf officials need to remind the players they are setting examples for millions of recreational golfers around the world. Everybody is happy to be back on the golf course again, but minding the little things about playing safely will ensure that that opportunity doesn’t go away.

But overall, Sunday’s match was a welcome reminder of why we watch sports.

There was the unexpected, which was Brady, often called the greatest player of all time in a dangerous sport with countless fast-moving parts, feeling humiliated because he couldn’t control a little white ball that wasn’t even moving as he swung at it.

Then, for Brady, there was startling, unpredicted revival and redemption.

Everyone, even his opponents, smiled.

The competition and camaraderie continued.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

He thought he was getting football physicals. He was being abused.

By ALAN BLINDER

F

or more than 40 years, Chuck Christian did not call himself a victim because he did not think he was one.

He was a muralist who had played tight end at Michigan. He grew up poor in Detroit but came to be a world traveler. He contracted prostate cancer and outlived his doctors’ predictions.

Then, in February, an old teammate called.

Remember Dr. Robert Anderson? The team doctor at Michigan who performed painful, unexplained rectal examinations? Someone reported him, the former teammate said, and it turns out that what he did to you, and to so many other players, was probably a crime.

“I realized that he had victimized so many of us,” Christian said in a recent interview.

Since February, when the university revealed findings of a secret, long-running investigation, hundreds of people have complained about Anderson’s conduct. As the inquiry unfolded, lawyers said it was increasingly clear that while Michigan achieved decades of success with many of the nation’s finest athletes, it also harbored a vast sexual abuse scandal.

Christian soon learned that, like him, many other athletes had quietly left the campus without recognizing that Anderson’s behavior demanded an investigation.

These days, Christian grapples with questions about how long his cancer may have grown undetected because his experience with Anderson had instilled a lasting distrust of doctors.

“Dr. Anderson left a stain behind,” Christian, 60, said last month. “Now others will have to clean up his mess.”

Christian was the youngest of four boys, and his first field was Frederick Street, on a Detroit block near Mount Elliott Cemetery.

“If it snowed, we’d go out, shovel the snow, put on our gloves and still play,” Christian said. He was probably 4 or 5 inches too short to earn a basketball scholarship, and when it came time to consider a pile of football offers, his mother wanted him to stay close to home.

Ann Arbor was less than 50 miles away, and coach Bo Schembechler was making Michigan into a Rose Bowl mainstay. Christian chose the Wolverines.

‘It Hurt Like Crazy’ Not long after he arrived on campus in 1977, Christian went to see Anderson, who earned his medical degree from the university in 1953.

Anderson came to be regarded as “a pioneer in the field of sports medicine,” as an

Chuck Christian near his home in a suburb south of Boston. alumni magazine said later, but at the time, he drew power from his status as a gateway to Michigan’s gridiron: He oversaw annual physicals for football players.

When Christian first went for his, he expected a physical as routine as those he had had in high school: a hernia check and some testing of his joints. Anderson did those, Christian said, but also — inexplicably and inappropriately, medical experts said — put on a glove and conducted a rectal exam.

“It hurt like crazy, and I screamed like a baby,” Christian said. “He said, ‘Oh, you feel pressure?’ I said, ‘No, I feel pain.’”

But he passed the physical.

Each year, he braced for his physical. Each year, he said nothing.

“I knew if I said, ‘No, no, don’t do that,’ it could cause him to fail me with my physical,” Christian said. “And I didn’t want to fail my physical because I really wanted to play football at Michigan.”

Wearing No. 85, he played in Michigan’s first Rose Bowl victory since 1965.

‘You Tuck It Away’ Christian remembers being the only art major who also wore a football letter jacket at Michigan, but he followed a fairly ordinary path as he finished college. He earned his de-

gree, married his girlfriend and moved to Massachusetts to escape a wretched economy in Michigan. He worked at a bank for a while but felt trapped and out of place.

He turned to a career in art and had three sons as the family settled into one of Boston’s southern suburbs. He would see Anderson on television during games but did not dwell on their encounters because, he said, “you tuck it away somewhere you don’t have to deal with it, don’t have to think about it, don’t have to talk about it.”

All the while, Christian generally avoided doctors and resisted the most intimate medical procedures. When he went to a doctor at age 45, the snap of a glove sent his mind scrambling to Anderson’s office, and he refused a prostate exam. About seven years later, in 2012, Christian declined to see a urologist after a worrisome lab result.

But in 2016, he began waking nearly a dozen times a night to use the bathroom.

His wife and his primary care doctor, whose discussions with Christian over the years had been mostly about his blood pressure, insisted that he see a urologist and have a complete evaluation.

The specialist checked Christian’s prostate and found it hard and enlarged. Testing

revealed that it was overwhelmed with cancer cells and that the disease had spread.

A blood test showed Christian’s prostatespecific antigen level was more than 16 times higher than normal, and his Gleason score, a 10-point measure of prostate cancer’s aggressiveness, was a 9.

Christian had maybe three years to live, doctors told him just before his 57th birthday.

“We just sat there and looked at each other,” his wife, LaDonna Christian, recalled. “We were just starting our lives. Our kids just left.

We just paid off the loans. This is not supposed to be happening.”

Anderson, who retired in 2003, was already dead.

A Letter, and an Inquiry Not long after Chuck Christian’s graduation, a defensive tackle from Louisiana named Warde Manuel enrolled at Michigan. More than three decades later, Manuel was his alma mater’s athletic director, and in July 2018 he received a letter from a former wrestler.

Anderson, the wrestler wrote, had in the early and mid-1970s “felt my penis and testicles and inserted his finger into my rectum too many times for it to be considered diagnostic.”

The wrestler described a reaction much like Christian’s, a perspective that experts consider common among abuse victims: “He was the doctor, and it never occurred to me that he was enjoying what I was not.”

The letter eventually prompted a police investigation, and more people described troubling encounters with Anderson. One, who was 65 when he spoke to authorities, said he had received more prostate exams as a student than as an adult.

According to law enforcement documents obtained through a public records request, a former vice president for student life told investigators in November 2018 that he would “bet there are over 100 people” who could accuse Anderson of wrongdoing. The former vice president said he moved to fire Anderson decades ago after learning of what was happening in the exam rooms but instead allowed the doctor to resign to speed the process.

The investigator told the man that Anderson had never actually left the university, and the official was “visibly shaken,” according to a detective’s report.

Michigan did not disclose its inquiry until this February. (The university said its announcement had been prompted by the end of a review by prosecutors, not by an upcoming article in The Detroit News. The prosecutors said they could not file any charges because of Anderson’s death and Michigan’s statute of limitations.)

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Sudoku

29

How to Play:

Fill in the empty fields with the numbers from 1 through 9.

Sudoku Rules: Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

You have an extraordinary talent for spinning straw into gold. Providing the market with a product or service that is both luxurious and unique will earn you a fortunate.

Use this money to retire early, buy a holiday home or plan to take a relaxing trip. Getting a change of pace is important for a dynamo like you. You don’t like staying in the same place for long periods of time. You haven’t been able to set a busy itinerary. Instead, having to be content with sleeping late and moving at a leisurely pace.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

A sudden change of fortune could come through an inheritance, business partnership or marriage. Take this opportunity to indulge in some creature comforts that were previously out of reach. Splashing out on clothes, accessories and artwork will be lots of fun. Work is also a great source of pleasure for you. Learning how to operate some complicated machinery will help you produce gorgeous items that will sell for high prices. Prepare to become a superstar in your chosen field.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Scorpio

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Making a discovery will turn you into a hero. Everyone admires your innovative outlook. Don’t be surprised when you’re invited to join a creative team. It will be so much fun to brainstorm with people who are seeking solutions instead of staying mired in problems. Push yourself to celebrate this evening, even if you’re tired.

Your energy will soar once you dive into a festive mode.

A friend who understands your dreams will encourage you to take a bold career risk. Consider their advice A desire for fame and status will make you more outgoing than usual. Instead of resting on your laurels, you’ll take every opportunity to reach for bigger and better opportunities. Don’t be scared to apply for a more responsible job with a little more professional prestige. A powerful urge should be obeyed. Whether this means buying some new cologne or ordering a gourmet takeaway meal is unimportant. The key is to abandon yourself to sensual pleasure.

You’ve been blessed with both a body and a mind.

Having to postpone a religious, spiritual or cultural trip has sadden you. However, the sooner you re-book your tickets, the happier you will be. Don’t worry about finding a substitute at work or arranging for childcare right, everyone will understand why the changes in your plans have had to be made. Working with an unusual group of people will be stimulating. Some of your colleagues will make you scratch your head with confusion.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

You’re a sensual person who loves being petted, cuddled and kissed. However, you have had to suppress your physical desires. If you don’t have anyone special in your life, see if you can buy any home spa treatments. Don’t balk at the expense; treat it as an investment in your happiness. Taking the helm of a creative division will be a stimulating challenge. You’ll enjoy finding ways to motivate each member of the team. Some need gentle encouragement and others require ultimatums. Learning the difference will cultivate success.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Feel free to take the lead in a partnership. If you’re not happy with a proposal, make a counter offer. Are you yearning for more affection? Whisper sweet nothings into your amour’s ears. Be honest about the way you want to be treated. A surprising dividend is on the way. Whether you’ve won an award, have been given an inheritance or hit the lottery, it’s important to enjoy this exciting turn of events. You can worry about making travel arrangements or setting up tax shelters later when these things are once again permitted.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

You desire a greater measure of freedom in a relationship. If you’ve developed an interest in a hobby that doesn’t excite your best friend or romantic partner, it’s not a big deal. Take a course, join a club or play a sport. If you’re single, embrace your independence. Plan a vacation for the end of the year to a place that has fascinated you since childhood. Being able to visit, shop and eat is a pleasure you’ve been yearning for lately.

Undergoing an unusual form of healing like sound therapy, or using homeopathic remedies can make you feel a lot better. A highly practical friend has enjoyed great results from such a treatment. Schedule a virtual appointment with their health practitioner to discuss your issues. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. Don’t despair if you must repair or replace a costly appliance. You’ll be much happier with the new model, especially if you do lots of research before going shopping.

Falling head over heels in love is a strong possibility. It’s difficult to resist the allure of someone with a velvet voice who makes you laugh. Are you already in a relationship? Your amour will give you a beautiful token of their esteem. Maybe you can look at planning a short vacation. Although you can’t go just yet, searching alone will be lots of fun for you and your amour. There’s nothing like counting down the days until you escape the pressures of home.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

There’s nothing wrong with wanting more money and luxury goods. A better paid job could be offered to you. Taking it will allow you to buy a home, car and other luxuries. Don’t apologise for your good fortune. You attracted it through your upbeat attitude. If you’ve been thinking of relocating, you can now start the hunt with an estate agent. Moving to a place that is surrounded by greenery will fuel your creativity.

Although you appreciate city life, there’s something inspiring about attending to plants, flowers and trees.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

You’re ready to push your way to the head of the line. This is a refreshing change from waiting in the wings, praying to be noticed. By putting your talent on display, you’ll attract a wonderful creative opportunity that cultivates fame.

Getting paid to write a book or record a podcast will fill you with pride. It will also attract a loyal following. People welcome your upbeat outlook and witty observations. You help them see beauty in a world that is often portrayed as doomed.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star